Tuesday, May 10th 2016
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GIGABYTE, GALAX, and Inno3D Announce GTX 1080 Founders Edition Cards
GIGABYTE, GALAX, and Inno3D announced their GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition graphics cards. With the GeForce 10 Series, NVIDIA is selling its reference-design GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 cards at a $100 premium over the "suggested" starting price of non-reference cards, branded as "Founders Edition." These are merely reference-design cards that look good, but will not have any technical advantage over non-reference cards. NVIDIA is milking the crowd that loves the NVIDIA brand, and prefers reference-design cards. The GTX 1080 Founders Edition card will be priced at US $699, when it goes on sale, on May 27, 2016. Non-reference cards will start at $599.
Sources:
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44 Comments on GIGABYTE, GALAX, and Inno3D Announce GTX 1080 Founders Edition Cards
EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FOUNDERS EDITION
Bragging vapor chamber as something special, Sapphire has been using it on tons of cards for ages. Same goes for Gigabyte. So, not sure why it would be anything special.
All explanation needed bellow ;) :
Did you just not read my entire post?
And these FE cards are not binned at all, so any cooler worth its salt, whether vapor chamber or not will be able to cut the mustard.
As for other claims about reference designs being stupid and unworthy: there are users out there that build small form factor PCs, and a blower style cooler is their only option.
No torment of not getting one, like was the case with the GTX 680 when it showed. There was such a pent-up demand (I think more then for being late also) that Nvidia got chastised for the limited number. I think Nvidia knows they can't supply the cards (be it TSMC or GDDR5X or a mix of both), they can't get all their AIB's the number(s) they need really move to production. This is a means of tempering expectations with the under-toe of "oh we have them but folk just rather wait than pay a tribute" which in a way is truth. I see Nvidia moved up their plans; I think they wanted to be in throes of this launch say end of June. Not sure the reason for coming out early, but the marking found it's saving grace with "Supreme Leader Edition" introduction spin. Offering non-peasant reparation pricing, meant to bind the faithful for a couple of months.