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Nvidia GTX 1000 series


kuhla

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I wanted to post this one detail that I've found since we briefly discussed this in the group chat.

 

Essentially, Nvidia’s GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 Founders Editions are what used to be known as Nvidia’s reference cards.

The Founders Edition cards don’t feature an out-of-the-box overclock, nor do they pack specially binned Pascal GPUs capable of achieving higher overclocking speeds than the chips you’d find in any other GTX 1080 or 1070.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3067744/components-graphics/nvidias-geforce-gtx-1080-and-gtx-1070-founders-edition-graphics-cards-explained.html

 

The reference cards now pack a decent price premium, and will sell over msrp. Nvidia does have a decent reference cooler on their cards, but I'm not exactly sure where this idea for a price premium on reference cards came from. I guess we'll see if it works out. There is a minor time advantage that the Nvidia founders editions have, I believe the release date is May 27th for those cards. I'm not sure if the other OEMs are going to release their reference cards at the same higher MSRP, this entire pricing structure makes very little sense.

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I wanted to post this one detail that I've found since we briefly discussed this in the group chat.

 

Essentially, Nvidia’s GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 Founders Editions are what used to be known as Nvidia’s reference cards.

The Founders Edition cards don’t feature an out-of-the-box overclock, nor do they pack specially binned Pascal GPUs capable of achieving higher overclocking speeds than the chips you’d find in any other GTX 1080 or 1070.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3067744/components-graphics/nvidias-geforce-gtx-1080-and-gtx-1070-founders-edition-graphics-cards-explained.html

 

The reference cards now pack a decent price premium, and will sell over msrp. Nvidia does have a decent reference cooler on their cards, but I'm not exactly sure where this idea for a price premium on reference cards came from. I guess we'll see if it works out. There is a minor time advantage that the Nvidia founders editions have, I believe the release date is May 27th for those cards. I'm not sure if the other OEMs are going to release their reference cards at the same higher MSRP, this entire pricing structure makes very little sense.

 

Nvidia Press Release - http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-quantum-leap-in-gaming:-nvidia-introduces-geforce-gtx-1080

 

I'm not sure where they pulled the "they are not specially binned" part from. That has not been explicitly stated, at least not in the official press release.

 

The only release date given so far is for the Founder's cards so I'm wondering if they are anticipating some kind of big gap of time between the two and treating this like early pre-order but if that's the plan, they need to be a bit more clear on that.

 

"Reference" card and cooler is pretty loose term these days. If it's blower style cooler and maintains the same dimensions as the nvidia-direct card, I've seen people colloquially call that "reference" (although technically it's not, what about power delivery? cooling on power delivery?).

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They pulled the "not special binned" part from the press meeting afterwards. I've seen at least two sources mention it so it must have been a question people had that wasn't made clear in the official presentation.

I doubt that Nvidia would release their cards much more than a month early, I'm not really sure what that would accomplish other than pissing off their OEM partners just to capture a few sales for themselves.

My bet is that they'll have a "soft launch" with the founders edition at the end of this month, and we'll have a harder more broad launch sometime in early June.

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"Reference" card and cooler is pretty loose term these days. If it's blower style cooler and maintains the same dimensions as the nvidia-direct card, I've seen people colloquially call that "reference" (although technically it's not, what about power delivery? cooling on power delivery?).

 

 

Case in point, here is Inno3D's PR (look at the second pic): http://www.inno3d.com/products_detail.php?refid=235

 

Unless that picture is just a placeholder, it looks just like the "reference" card.

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"Preview" article on anandtech for the GTX1080 - http://anandtech.com/show/10326/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-preview

 

[....]

Translating this into numbers, at 4K we’re looking at 30% performance gain versus the GTX 980 Ti and a 70% performance gain over the GTX 980, amounting to a very significant jump in efficiency and performance over the Maxwell generation.

[....]

 

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Several reviews are out. Here's a link to all of them:

http://videocardz.com/60113/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-reviews

 

Here's a few links I consider worthwhile:

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2016/05/17/nvidia_geforce_gtx_1080_founders_edition_review/

http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-review,1.html

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/GeForce-GTX-1080-8GB-Founders-Edition-Review-GP104-Brings-Pascal-Gamers

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-pascal,4572.html

 

From what I'm gathering, you can see as much as 30-40% higher performance than a 980Ti at 1440p. This card is starting to approach the limits of playing at 4k (depending on how optimized the game is).

I've seen as high as 70% increases over a regular 980 at 1440p depending on the game and the test.

 

It looks like they really did put some serious performance figures out with this one. I'm already tempted to look into buying one.
Most of the reviewers do at least mention that the new pricing scheme seems like bullshit, and that it's probably better to wait until OEMs release their cards and possibly even their "reference" cards rather than pay the $100 premium to get a card quickly/directly from nvidia. Anandtech mentioned that they suspect OEMs will be releasing their cards sometime in June (which is what I had guessed as well).

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Well let's be more correct with the cost here.

The GTX 1080 has a MSRP of $599 but the "Founders Edition" which is the direct from Nvidia reference card is actually $699.

Founders Edition Releases May 24th no firm release date for OEM cards - estimated release date in June.

 

The GTX 1070 has a MSRP of $379 and the "Founders Edition" is $449

Founders edition release date on June 10th, no firm release date for OEM cards, possibly releasing on the same date.

 

I haven't seen full reviews of the 1070, but my bet is that it will be a nice improvement but not close to the 1080, in fact some people have mentioned that AMD seems to be doing a better job of attacking the mid-range GPU market.

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http://videocardz.com/60163/nvidia-releases-full-geforce-gtx-1070-specifications-and-first-benchmarks

 

I don't see proper benchmarks posted yet, until I do I can only help but notice the rather large cuts made across the board. The difference between a 980 and 970 was not nearly as stark is the difference between the 1080 and 1070.

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Well the fact that the 1080 uses gddr5x and the 1080 is still using regular gddr5 is a pretty substantial difference. That's an entirely different set of memory sitting on the board, not just a difference in clocks.

The 970 had their weird 3.5 + .5 memory thing but it was at least still the same set of gddr5 on both the 970 and 980.

 

Excel table for reference.

wZE4qHf.jpg

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It mostly depends on the resolution you're playing at. If you play games at 1080p a 900 series card should provide you with plenty of performance or maybe the new 1070 if you really wanted the newest tech.

If you play games at 1440p or above then it makes far more sense to get the gtx 1080.

 

As far as "needing" that kind of gpu performance, again it's a value judgement. I would point out that the current trend in PC ports seems to lean heavily on VRAM, and a 1070 with it's 8gb's of VRAM would have some decent future proofing built in.

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Some gtx 1080 card photos are starting to come out from various OEMs.

 

Gigabyte's new card uses a different cooler than their old tripple fan windforce cooler, it looks to be a little shorter than their old cards, but it does have an extended pcb

GIGABYTE-GeForce-GTX-1080-XTREME-GAMING.

 

Asus Strix card, looks like it's a 3 slot solution, seems fat and unnecessary.

ASUS-ROG-STRIX-GeForce-GTX-1080-VC-900x7

Zotac has a more standard design and a fat obnoxious design as well:

ZOTAC-GeForce-GTX-1080-AMP-2.jpg

ZOTAC-GeForce-GTX-1080-AMP-EXTREME-3.jpg

EVGA's superclocked card:

big_evga-1080-sc-5.jpg.jpg

 

Most of these will likely be on display at computex (May 31st) so I expect we'll get some additional details and probably some reviews soon afterwards.

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The reference design does use a vapor chamber. The current 900 series also used a vapor chamber design. I believe this is standard for GPUs now.

The 1080 runs hot, and considering the current power draw, some people are going to be disappointed with the overclocks available unless you start doing some crazy shit like watercooling.

 

I'm already seeing some comments of people saying "oh man why are they releasing X card with only an 8pin?!?! how will I possibly overclock on a single 8 pin!?!?!" I run my current 970 stock, and I have a feeling I wouldn't be doing any overclocking on a 1080 either. I think thermals are going to be the largest bottleneck for these cards which is why I'm seeing plenty of 3 slot designs with ridiculously overbuilt coolers.

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