GIGABYTE, GALAX, and Inno3D Announce GTX 1080 Founders Edition Cards

[$ReaPeR$]

LOL that price..

 

[BiggieShady]

Not sure the reason for coming out early

As I see it, coming out early with that price is for two things: having upper hand in price wars with AMD and milking the early adopters to compensate lower initial availability ... you know, having a cake and eating it too.

 

[Casecutter]

LOL that price..

tis brilliant marketing...
In some ways it's like promoting predetermine price drop that perhaps won't metallize! While everyone thinks that $599 (14.5%) lower price over the release price of a FE, will be what AIB customs will go for... they won't! Most customs will end up being more $630-660. This is a price increase of like 20% over the old 980 MSRP. For the 1070 Supreme Lead Edition that a 36.5% price increase over it's $330 MSRP! While figure most AIB custom 1070's will price out like $400-430.

Let's hope AMD/RTG hold to what they've been touting "Affordable and Efficient GPU Design For Everyone!"

 

[xorbe]

$699 for a 1080? How much is the 1080Ti going to be.

 

[Ikaruga]

$699 for a 1080? How much is the 1080Ti going to be.

$1080

 

[efikkan]

I understand that some people have cases which needs a blower fan. But I think that paying a premium of $100 for a better cooler, custom PCB and cherry-picked chip is even a stretch, so paying a premium of $100 for a reference design with no benefits except the blower fan (if needed) sounds like a bad investment. I would have no problem with this if it cost roughly the same as other designs, but this premium price is going to prevent this from being a success.

 

[the54thvoid]

Let's hope AMD/RTG hold to what they've been touting "Affordable and Efficient GPU Design For Everyone!"

That means cheap without a promise of any performance. No thanks. I'd prefer market freedom of choice .
Also what was Nano release price again ? Ah, yes, less performance than Fury X with air cooler instead of water AIO but same price...
AMD are not saints. Radeon Pro, 2 x Fury X but £300 more expensive ...

Do people forget GTX680 came in at same price as HD7970 with more performance? I truly am amazed at the ignorance towards pricing people have with regards to a commercial commodity...

They're both out to make money.

 

[WaroDaBeast]

oh come on, I have a Galax GTX 970, same company that's behind KFA2.

Sorry dude, Zoom the Dolphin is what comes to my mind first. Hey, come to think of it, that could be a good mascot.

 

[BlueFalcon]

You know, my stupid GTX780 that was reference had a vapor chamber cooler. It had the same cooler that the Titan had when it debuted (which was the first vapor chamber cooler that nVidia produced.) All subsequent high end nVidia cards have had vapor chamber coolers. They're nothing new when it comes to nVidia.

Vapor chamber cooling goes far beyond GTX780:

"So for GTX 580 NVIDIA has done a lot of work under the hood to produce a card that looks less like the GTX 480 and more like the all-enclosed coolers we saw with the GTX 200 series; the grill, external heatpipes, and PCB ventilation holes are all gone from the GTX 580, and no one would hold it against you to mistake it for a GTX 285. The biggest change in making this possible is NVIDIA’s choice of heatsink: NVIDIA has ditched traditional heatpipes and gone to the new workhorse of vapor chamber cooling."

Even HD5970, 6950/6970 and 7970 all had vapor chambers. HD6950 cost $299 and HD6970 cost $379. NV is just charging a $70 premium for 1070 and $100 for 1080 extra and renamed Reference Card into Founders Edition. It's just a marketing play to add on $70-100 premiums and pretend vapor chamber cooling is something exotic when it isn't.

Cracking open the 6970 we find the PCB with the Cayman GPU at the center in all its 389mm2 glory. Moving on to the cooling apparatus, vapor chamber coolers are clearly in vogue this year. AMD already used a vapor chamber last year on the dual-GPU 5970, while this year both AMD and NVIDIA are using them on their high-end single-GPU products."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds-radeon-hd-6970-radeon-hd-6950/11

"The 7970’s blower is a bit larger (~75mm) and the fins are slightly larger to make use of that space. Cracking open the 6970 we find the PCB with the Cayman GPU at the center in all its 389mm2 glory. As with the 6970 an aluminum heatsink sits on top of a vapor chamber cooler that draws heat from the GPU and other components towards the heatsink."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review/14

This is just a way for NV to charge OEMs more $ because OEMs love to use a reference board in pre-built systems. It also means people who need the latest to show off on launch day/week and cannot wait 1 month for after market cards will be giving NV $70-100 extra. Great way for NV to milk its customer base. I have concerns that AIBs will just release after-market cards at $650-699 themselves since cards like the Gigabyte G1 will outperform the reference card in every way, suddenly making it seem like a great deal at $699 instead of $599 NV outlined for AIBs.

 

[BlueFalcon]

Do people forget GTX680 came in at same price as HD7970 with more performance? I truly am amazed at the ignorance towards pricing people have with regards to a commercial commodity...

They're both out to make money.

What does 7970 have anything to do with 1080? 680 cost $499 and it outperformed the GTX580 by 30% at 2560x1600. 680 also barely beat 7970 925mhz by 3% per TPUs benches, and we all know there was never a reference blower HD7970Ghz for sale. Many after-market 7970s overclocked to 1125-1150mhz on stock voltage. The last thing you want to do is bring up 7970 to justify 1080's pricing. 7970 when overclocked absolutely destroyed an overclocked 580, while delivering double the VRAM for $50 more. Today an overclocked 7970 is easily 50-80% faster in modern games than a 580.

That's not even the point. Fact is NV raised prices from a reference 680 from $499 to $549 on the 980 and yet again to $599/$699 on the 1080. At the same time they severely neutered the 1070 with standard GDDR5 and only 2048 or maybe even 1920 CUDA cores. In short, NV raised the price of the 980 successor and 970 successor, and yet the 1070 is going to be way slower than the 1080 now. That's a lose-lose for both x70 and x80 cards compared to last generation. It's hard to be excited about paying $600-700 for a 40mm2 Pascal with 320GB/sec when we know Vega 10 and Big Pascal should have > 700GB/sec of HBM2 and a lot more performance.

 

[Casecutter]

Also what was Nano release price again? Fury X with air cooler instead of water AIO but same price

Hum, a specialty offering that had as much or more engineering/manufacturing in it's small limited volume cooler than a mainstream product using predominantly existing equipment. That's how it works, if your showcasing your competency/capability to fill a niche market, it will normally carry a premium.

GTX680 came in at same price as HD7970 with more performance?

Well no, the GTX 680 came in at $50 less than the 7970 that had the market for 4mo's, while quantifying a GTX680 (reference) as having more performance is subjective. Figure once the TSMC process was revamped and the 7970Ghz came in (2mo later) it offer more performance for the GTX680 price of $500.

ignorance towards pricing people have with regards to a commercial commodity

Well yes if seen as commodity they should be subject to such market commodity price; as "great" 1440p gaming in middle of 2016 should be more like $300.

 

[$ReaPeR$]

tis brilliant marketing...
In some ways it's like promoting predetermine price drop that perhaps won't metallize! While everyone thinks that $599 (14.5%) lower price over the release price of a FE, will be what AIB customs will go for... they won't! Most customs will end up being more $630-660. This is a price increase of like 20% over the old 980 MSRP. For the 1070 Supreme Lead Edition that a 36.5% price increase over it's $330 MSRP! While figure most AIB custom 1070's will price out like $400-430.

Let's hope AMD/RTG hold to what they've been touting "Affordable and Efficient GPU Design For Everyone!"

ikr! for what it is (and will be when the ti comes out) that price is a bit steep. also i do not believe this card will be able to handle 4k at max setting at 60fps and that is really pathetic at this point, i mean you pay 700$ ffs.

$1080

LOL

That means cheap without a promise of any performance. No thanks. I'd prefer market freedom of choice .
Also what was Nano release price again ? Ah, yes, less performance than Fury X with air cooler instead of water AIO but same price...
AMD are not saints. Radeon Pro, 2 x Fury X but £300 more expensive ...

Do people forget GTX680 came in at same price as HD7970 with more performance? I truly am amazed at the ignorance towards pricing people have with regards to a commercial commodity...

They're both out to make money.

are you serious with the market freedom bs?! where do you see market freedom with only 2 gpu providers in the discrete market, and one of them has 80% of the market due to marketing bs and some dodgy dealings. thats basically a monopoly mate, wake up.

 

[newconroer]

Wait what? Nvidia was meant to be selling 'Founders' edition cards direct. Why the need for the third party?

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

"Founders Edition"... My guess is low availability of gddr5x which limits the number of cards hence the higher price, but w/e... "Milking Edition"

 

[Xzibit]

Founders Edition more like Financial Extraction

Did everyone forget that AIBs do offer blower style cards. The only difference this time around is Nvidia publicly promising that they will make reference/FEs available until EOL. <-That's the big difference. AIBs after a period might not re-supply blower style cards if they don't sell well.

MSI, EVGA and others always have similar offering.

 

[xorbe]

Wait what? Nvidia was meant to be selling 'Founders' edition cards direct. Why the need for the third party?

As someone that dealt with NV direct for service, probably they figured out that they don't want to be in the biz of dealing with end-users.

 

[H82LUZ73]

Wow hardware porn ...Now for the nude stuff from Wizz.These cards look sexy as heck.

 

[Slizzo]

Vapor chamber cooling goes far beyond GTX780:

Yeah, couldn't be sure on the others as I was working from memory.

When it comes down to it, the $700 is an early adopter tax, as well as nVidia's way of not competing with their board partners at the outset. Allowing them to go as low as $600 (or lower, though not likely) with their own designs if they so choose.

 

[Prima.Vera]

Just check out how much this FE garbage costs in JP ))))))))))))

http://kakaku.com/item/K0000880842/?lid=ksearch_kakakuitem_image

http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=111,002&From=JPY&To=USD

 

[Jury Pool Reject]

...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.

EXACTLY... I'll be building a new Mini-ITX rig soon in a Phanteks Evolv case. A blower style 1080 would be the better choice for my needs.