ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 ArcticStorm 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.
  

The ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 ArcticStorm a rather sexy looking product, once you hooked it up and RGB LED color configure it, you'll be looking at something rather special. You will spot a nice matte black PCB with 10-phases (8+2) and two power headers (both 8-pin) for a little more overclocking headroom, similar to the AMP! edition.

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 one liquid cooled, albeit not needed with modern air cooler, does bring in a certain x-factor to your PC.

The card is clocked very shy out of the box alright, box with a boost clock of 1,771 MHz. The PCB is as mentioned matte black in color. Some of its features are:

• SPECTRA LED Lighting System
• Direct copper cold block contact with 0.3 mm micro-channels
• Full coverage with waterblock
• Metal wraparound backplate
• Standard G1/4 threaded fitting and comes bundled with a pair of barbs that supports 10 mm inner diameter tubing

The card itself is a dual-slot solution. The LEDs embedded in this graphics card can be controlled with a Zotac APP. Check out the backside where there is a thick sturdy metal back-plate with plenty of venting spaces applied as well. ZOTAC used the AMP! backplate, and I completely fail to see why they used it. I find the frontside cooling block to be subtle in all manners and ways, and then this screamy industrial looking thing at the backside...  it just does not make any sense (to me, taste however is a subjective matter).

The card has a power design of roughly 180 Watts. The GeForce GTX 1080 is DisplayPort 1.2 certified and DP 1.3/1.4 Ready, enabling support for 4K displays at 120 Hz, 5K displays at 60 Hz, and 8K displays at 60 Hz (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).