NVIDIA’s event just last Friday was quite exciting in and of itself, with the announcement of the coming availability of two new cards based on their Pascal architecture. The GTX 1080 and 1070 represent a new direction for them, with the architecture initially having been developed solely with the GPU acceleration of AI in mind. NVIDIA also announced the availability of a Founders Edition, which differs from the normal edition. Though those differences aren’t quite what we thought. They aren’t specially binned chips, which is only slightly disappointed.
The GTX 1080 Founders Edition has only minor differences for that extra $100
The pricing for the Founders Edition is $700 for the GTX 1080 and presumably $450 for the GTX 1070. The difference is that these are actually the reference cards straight from NVIDIA themselves. That means you’ll get the neat polygonal cooler that was shown cooling a GTX 1080 to around 60-degrees Celsius running at 2.2GHz, not an easy feat.
The disappointing news is that this supposedly special edition won’t be clocked any higher than the non-founders edition and they won’t be specifically binned chips that are more easily overclockable either. Instead, it just means you’re getting the reference blower cooler and an NVIDIA box instead. The cooler is likely less efficient than some third-party coolers anyhow, considering ASUS, Gigabyte and others will have two and three fan solutions that are more efficient and allow more temperature overhead for faster clocks.
It seems that the normal price is being somewhat praised, that we’ll see Titan X performance for much less than the cost of that card. That alone is fantastic, but this mirrors the pricing of previous generations. The 980 was priced similarly, with the 980 Ti and Titan X appropriately more expensive. It stands to reason that we’ll see just the same, making the price not that great. The 1080 Ti and the Titan XX (perhaps XXX is more appropriate?) will be prices just the same a the Maxwell generation. So the pricing is reasonable, but isn’t that amazing considering the performance increase we’ll likely see with the bit Pascal chips later on next year. It’s… the same as every generation.