Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 AORUS Xtreme review

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Product Showcase

Product Showcase

Let's start with our photo-shoot. A few pages that show the ins and outs with photos, all taken with an in-house photo-shoot of course.
  

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So the Aorus Xtreme is the most high-end 1080 SKU that Gigabyte delivers. Gigabyte COMPLETELY moved away from the reference design and merely use an official Pascal GPU.
  

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First glimpse, yeah that's going to be fun to test alright. Aorus ladies and gents, the new premium brand from Gigabyte that comes with some nice perks like a four year warranty on this product. Targeted at you guys, the PC Gaming DiY cumminity.
 
  

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Gigabyte even overhauled the packaging to give it that premium luxurious feel. Hidden inside the carton boxes is a product that comes with one very fast graphics processor harbored in a nice matte black PCB with 12-phases (10+2) and two power headers (both 8-pin) for a little more overclocking headroom. Obviously it's all RGB as well.

 

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As board partners are allowed to release the 1080 model cards in their own configurations you will see many versions, mostly based on customized PCB/component and the obviously mandatory different cooling solutions. The card is one of the fastest out of the box with a boost clock of 1898 MHz. 

  • Boost: 1936 MHz / Base: 1784 MHz in OC mode 
  • Boost: 1898 MHz / Base: 1759 MHz in Gaming mode
The card comes with two clock frequency modes. Gaming mode is the default BIOS modus. And with the Gigabyte proprietary software you can enable the OC mode which brings in a small extra boost. Unfortunately that requires you to have the software active at all time. We'll test the gaming mode as such. The PCB is as mentioned matte black in color, and of course the new Windforce Stack 3x cooler is being used.

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The card itself is a massive triple-slot solution, it is heat-pipe based, the GPU is cooled by a copper base plate connected heat pipes (6 heatpipes). In low-load situations fans are not needed thus up-to roughly 60 Degrees C, the fans won't even spin. The RGB LEDs embedded in this graphics card can be controlled with the Gigabyte software. Check out the backside where there is a thick sturdy metal back-plate is present, no ventilation gaps though. The logo to the left side is also RGB LED activated and configurable. We'll talk about that copper slab on the next page.


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You probably have noticed the rather unusual location of two extra HDM connectors. These are there for VR headsets. Since the front-side has 3x DP, 1x HDMI and 1 DVI there was no space left. While great to see extra HDMI ports, it's an unusual spot for them we agree, as the HDMI cabling would need to lead inwards into your chassis.
  

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The card has a power design of roughly 180 Watts, but due to the high clocks and extensive tweaking design please add some more.  The GeForce GTX 1080 is DisplayPort 1.2 certified and DP 1.3/1.4 Ready, enabling support for 4K displays at 120Hz, 5K displays at 60Hz, and 8K displays at 60Hz (using two cables). This model includes three DisplayPort connectors, three HDMI 2.0b connectors, and one dual-link DVI connector. The GTX 1080 display pipeline supports HDR gaming, as well as video encoding and decoding. New to Pascal is HDR Video (4K@60 10/12b HEVC Decode), HDR Record/Stream (4K@60 10b HEVC Encode), and HDR Interface Support (DP 1.4).

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