The Founders Edition of NVIDIA’s newest Pascal-based GTX 1080 is now selling at retailers, available to everyone. Now that the main event is over, AIB’s are taking the time to introduce their own custom cards with better, more efficient cooling and with the potential for higher overclocking due to more robust power delivery and PCB designs.
Zotac and EVGA are the first to introduce their custom GTX 1080 designs
Zotac is building upon their AMP cooler designs and adding a redesigned Icestorm cooler. The new cooler will sport better ball-bearings, a slightly different fan design and much more efficient internal thermal management programming. They’ll have two different options, the Amp and the Amp Extreme. The former will have five heatpipes and two 100mm fans whereas the Amp Extreme will be upgraded to six heatpipes and a larger heatsink with three 90mm fans. They’ll both have a 0dBa idle mode that they’re appropriately calling Freeze.
Both models will have their RGB LED lighting system, called Spectra, that allow the the front and the rear to be lit-up in any number of combinations through their proprietary software, the FireStorm app. Currently the final core and memory clocks have not been decided.
EVGA’s card is said to be a drastic improvement over the previous ACX 2.0 design. The goal that they’re going for is enabling a much cooler running GPU, including all of the tertiary PCB components. They’ve installed a memory and MOSFET cooling plate that should keep those components 15 and 13% cooler respectively. Straight heatpipes and an updated heatsink design are said to help decrease temperature by 10% and decrease noise by around 13%. EVGA’s also has a 0dBa idle mode and RGB LED’s on the face that can be controlled by the PXOC software utility.
They’re also releasing Precision X 6.0 which will have much more fine-tuned control and even an automatic overclocking aspect to it to help find the optimal speeds to work at. It’s also one of the few applications that’ll be able to show the performance in DirectX 12 game as well.
EVGA’s GTX 1080 will have a decent boost, already, over the Founders Edition, running at 1708MHz compared to 1607MHz with a boost clock of 1847MHz compared to 1733MHz. Not a bad upgrade considering. It also has one eight pin PCIe power connector.
Availability of the EVGA is now with Zotac coming quite soon, though no hard date has been specified.