Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 G1 GAMING review - 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.
  

So the GeForce GTX 1080 G1 GAMING is quite something, Gigabyte merely re-used that Pascal GPU and started building a new graphics card. You will spot a nice matte black PCB with 8-GPU phases. Interestingly enough it has one power header only (one 8-pin). The PCB is as mentioned matte black in color, and of course the new revision WindForce 3X cooler is being used with the dandy 'blade' style fans. These cards will look just terrific in a dark themed PC, I mean just look at it.

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. This is the G1 edition of the GAMING series, meaning it has higher clocks and a back-plate, quite impressive as well. The GeForce GTX 1080 G1 GAMING has default clock frequencies of 1835 MHz (boost) / 1695 (base) MHz with a reference clocked 8192 MB GDDR5X / 10108 MHz effective data-rate on the memory.

The card itself is a dual-slot solution, it is composite heat-pipe based, the GPU is cooled by a copper base plate directly connected to the heat-pipes. You won't hear the fan noise in low-load situations as the fans do not spin when they are not needed (up-to roughly 60 Degrees C), once it reaches that temperatures the three fans will kick in. The LEDs embedded in this graphics card can be controlled with the Xtreme engine software utility. These (top Gigabyte logo + fan stop area) are RGB configurable with a few animations as well.  Check out the backside where there is a thick sturdy metal back-plate, unfortunately Gigabyte did not make any ventilation gaps and holes in that back-plate. This design can easily trap heat and work against the product. 

The card is rated having a power design of 180 Watts, but due to the higher clocks and extensive tweaking design please add 10, maybe 15 extra Watts. 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, one HDMI 2.0b connector, and one dual-link DVI connector. Up to four display heads can be driven simultaneously from one card. 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).