Ahead of its launch, specifications of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti STRIX graphics card by ASUS, appeared on the web thanks to a leaked press-deck. The one spec on most people's minds is the factory-overclock. Out of the box, in the so-called "gaming mode," the card is clocked at 1569 MHz core, 1683 MHz GPU Boost, and an untouched 11 GHz (GDDR5X-effective) memory. The "OC Mode," a clock-speed preset that you activate with the included GPUTweak II software, runs the card at 1594 MHz core, 1708 MHz GPU Boost, and 11.1 GHz memory.

It turns out that the DirectCU III cooler deployed on the GTX 1080 Ti STRIX is indeed beefier than the one found on the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 STRIX cards; with ASUS claiming up to 30% lower temperatures, thanks to a 40% increase in surface area of the heatsink. ASUS took advantage of the heavier heatsink to lower fan-noise, which it claims to be significantly lower than the reference-design card. The company is also using a newer thermal interface material (TIM) called "MaxContact," which due to its particle density, can get up to 10 times flatter than conventional TIMs, for lower thermal resistance posed by the TIM, and higher conductivity. Display outputs of this card include two each of HDMI 2.0b and DisplayPort 1.4 ports.

With the release of Nvidia's newest flagship gaming GPU, the GTX 1080 Ti, Phanteks is excited to introduce the Glacier Series G1080 Ti. The full cover waterblock from Phanteks are designed to work seamlessly with Nvidia's new GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition and Titan X cards, which allows serious overclocking and extreme performance.

Made from premium materials according to the finest standards of craftsmanship from Phanteks, the G1080Ti water block delivers extreme cooling and improve stability under high overclocks for the enthusiasts. VITON sealing from the Automotive and Aerospace Industries ensure the best reliability and longevity. The Glacier Series features RGB lighting to let you synchronize lighting patterns and effects from our RGB motherboard and Phanteks RGB products. Phanteks Glacier G1080 Ti will be available in April, 2017 with two color options: Mirrored Chrome and Satin Black, with pricing set at €149,90 / £129.99.

ZOTAC International, a global manufacturer of innovation, is pleased to raise the stakes once more with ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards, pushing the limits ever higher on speed and power with the NVIDIA Pascal Architecture. Like with other ZOTAC flagship graphics card series, the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 Ti will be available in AMP Extreme, AMP Edition and the Founders Edition.

The ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 Ti AMP Extreme and AMP Edition feature improved ZOTAC elements, emphasizing user experience befitting of a flagship product. From the tradition of quality hardware components to unique features, the ZOTAC AMP line of graphics cards bring much more than smooth frame rates and next generation immersion.

Remember that NVIDIA driver update that I mentioned yesterday? NVIDIA has just released into the wild. Version 378.78 of its GeForce driver suite provides the optimal gaming experience for Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands and includes DirectX 12 optimizations which provide additional performance increases for a variety of titles. This release also adds official support for the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, and updates the SLI profiles for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Titanfall 2, and Tom Clancy's The Division. ANSEL support for Ghost Recon Wildlands is also baked into this update, which joins the likes of Dishonored 2, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, Watch Dogs 2, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and The Witness, with Mass Effect: Andromeda support coming in at the game's launch.

Update: According to NVIDIA, average performance gains across all titles stands at around 16%. NVIDIA boasts of a 33% (no, that isn't a typo) on Tomb Raider; 16% on Hitman; Gears of War 4 sees a boost of 10%; Ashes of the Singularity makes do with 9%; and Tom Clancy's The Division will get a 4% increase.

As always, you can get your driver fix right here on TPU. Just follow the download link below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 378.78 Drivers

Feast your eyes on the first image of a reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card, compared side by side with the PCB of the company's flagship (still) TITAN X Pascal. As you can see, the GTX 1080 Ti is based on the same PCB as the TITAN X Pascal, since the two cards are based on the same "GP102" chip (albeit with different core configurations). To begin with, the GTX 1080 Ti features 11 memory chips, compared to 12 on the TITAN X Pascal, on account of its narrower 352-bit GDDR5X memory interface. It makes up for the narrower memory bus with faster 11 Gbps memory chips, than the 10 Gbps chips found on the TITAN X Pascal.

The main difference between the GTX 1080 Ti and TITAN X Pascal, however, is NVIDIA bolstering the VRM with a 2x dual-FET design. NVIDIA basically placed an additional set of MOSFETs and capacitors along all the blank traces of the reference PCB. This approach lowers the load on each individual MOSFET, in turn lowering VRM temperatures. It probably also enables a higher power-limit. NVIDIA also updated the reference design cooling solution with a new vapor-chamber base-plate. The cooler also exhausts through the entire width of the second slot in the card's I/O shield. This meant sacrificing the DVI connector. The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti goes on sale later this month, priced at US $699.

An NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti reference-design graphics card was overclocked to 2062 MHz core, and 11404 MHz (GDDR5X-effective) memory, and put through the 3DMark suite. The card was able to sustain its overclock without breaking a sweat, with its core temperature hovering around 63°C. Apparently, the card's power-limit was manually set to 122%, to sustain the overclock. In the standard FireStrike benchmark (1080p), the card churned up graphics scores of 31,135 points, followed by 15,093 points in FireStrike Extreme (1440p), and 7,362 points in the 4K Ultra HD version of the benchmark, FireStrike Ultra. The card also scored 10,825 points in the TimeSpy DirectX 12 benchmark. Overall, the card falls within 30-40% performance of an overclocked GTX 1080.

EVGA is giving final touches to its premium custom-design GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card, the EVGA GTX 1080 Ti FTW3. This card features one of the largest VGA air-cooling solutions ever deployed by the company, its new large variant of the iCX cooler it introduced with the GTX 1080 FTW2. Three 100 mm fans are suspended along an industrial-looking frame-like cooler shroud, which holds an illuminated company branding on top. The card draws power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and as our EVGA iCX reveal article details, the cooling solution goes beyond the heatsink and its fans; and includes 9 (or more) temperature sensors located at various points of the card, not to mention asynchronous fan-control, which lets you tweak the speeds of individual fans.

ZOTAC released renders of its upcoming GeForce GTX 1080 Ti PGF Edition graphics card, its most premium offering based on NVIDIA's new enthusiast-segment GPU. The card has a design focus on both aesthetics and top-grade overclocking capability. It begins with a gargantuan triple-slot cooling solution that features a dual split aluminium fin-stack heatsink that's ventilated by a trio of 100 mm spinners. The cooler is outfitted with multiple diffused RGB LED lighting elements, along the top side, around the fan intakes, and towards the bottom. Even the back-plate has an acrylic layer that doubles up as an LED diffuser. Not much is known about the PCB, except that it draws power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and features a strong VRM, including a multi-phase capacitor; and support for the ZOTAC OC+ external overclocking module.

INNO3D, a leading manufacturer of high-end hardware components and computer utilities, introduces its new flagship INNO3D GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards. The new range will be available in Founder Edition and the premium iChiLL series. Designed on NVIDIA's Pascal architecture, INNO3D GeForce GTX 1080 Ti iChiLL X3 and X4 simply own the concept of performance tops the previous flagship by no less than 35%. This makes it even faster in games than the world-famous TITAN X also built on NVIDIA's architecture. The new hero GPU comes packed with extreme gaming horsepower, utilizing next-gen 11 Gbps GDDR5X memory, and a massive 11GB frame buffer.

The new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti iChiLL X3 and X4 GPUs also come equipped with INNO3D's unmatched iChiLL cooling solution -awarded for better performance at lower noise levels- improves the overall active temperature control. The Herculez Armor back-plate protects the cards from outer damages as well and puts it way at the top of Ultra High End graphics cards in the world.

It looks like NVIDIA's add-in card (AIC) partners have been given a free hand to put out teaser images of their upcoming custom-design GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards. Earlier today, we caught the ASUS GTX 1080 Ti ROG STRIX, and now we get a glimpse of MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X. There's not much to see in the teaser-image, except the company's racy TwinFrozr VI cooler strapped on to what we spy to be a custom-design PCB. This appears to be MSI's topmost trim of the TwinFrozr VI, given that NVIDIA put in some work on improving its reference-design NVTTM (NVIDIA Time-to-market) cooler, with a vapor-chamber plate, and a dual-FET VRM design the lowers VRM temperatures. If there's a Gaming X card, then there is bound to be a pricier Gaming Z in the works, and a slightly affordable Gaming (non-X).

Besides the NVIDIA reference-design $699-ish GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, which doesn't come with a $100 Founders Edition sucker-tax, ASUS is giving final touches to at least two custom-design models, the GTX 1080 Ti ROG STRIX, and the GTX 1080 Ti Turbo, pictured in a leaked press image, below. The GTX 1080 Ti Turbo is positioned to be the more affordable of the two, and it won't surprise us if ASUS prices it cheaper than even its reference-design SKU. The card features a lateral-flow cooling solution strapped onto a PCB that closely resembles the reference-design.

Next up, is the company's Republic of Gamers (ROG) STRIX card, which could likely come in two variants, an OC variant with factory-overclocked speeds, and a standard variant that either ticks at reference speeds, or close-to-reference speeds. These cards feature a beefier variant of the DirectCU III cooling solution the company launched with its GTX 1080 STRIX cards, which comes with ASUS Aura Sync RGB LED lighting. The cooler will be mated to a custom-design PCB with a strong VRM, multiple case fan-headers (yes, case fan headers), and preparation for front-panel VR HMD connectivity.

Just before Holiday 2016 (December), we were intrigued by a curious line in a LinkedIn job-posting, which at the time confirmed that NVIDIA is working on the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, and more importantly, that existing users of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti would have a priority in a pre-order queue, or a "Step Up Offer." A step-up offer is that in which GTX 980 Ti users would have the ability to trade-in their GTX 980 Ti cards for new GTX 1080 Ti cards, at a price significantly lower than buying a brand-new GTX 1080 Ti card. From the looks of it, there is no sign of such an offer.

The other, more scary detail about the GTX 1080 Ti, which was doing rounds at the time, was its fabled $999 price-tag, with fears of NVIDIA price-gouging with the new card so as to not cannibalize inventory of premium GTX 1080 cards in stock, some of which are still priced over the $700 mark. Alas, the GTX 1080 Ti launched at $699, a price we're sure NVIDIA partners with unsold super-premium GTX 1080 cards won't take kindly, and the GTX 1080 got its price cut to $499. NVIDIA is taking no chances with its market preparation for AMD's next-generation Radeon RX Vega.

EK Water Blocks, the world renowned premium liquid cooling manufacturer, is pleased to announce that the existing EK-FC Titan X Pascal series water blocks are compatible with the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, NVIDIA's new flagship gaming GPU. In order to simplify the search for suitable and compatible water block EK has already added NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card to EK Cooling Configurator database.

These water blocks are made in Slovenia, Europe and are available for purchase through EK Webshop. Aesthetic retention backplates, which also cool the backside (memory IC and VRM) of the circuit board, are also available.

Looking back on NVIDIA's GDC presentation, perhaps one of the most interesting aspects approached was the implementation of tile-based rendering on NVIDIA's post-Maxwell architectures. This has been an adaptation of typically mobile approaches to graphics rendering which keeps their specific needs for power efficiency in mind - and if you'll "member", "Maxwell" was NVIDIA's first graphics architecture publicly touted for its "mobile first" design.

This approach essentially divides the screen into tiles, and then rasterizes the entire frame in a per-tile basis. 16×16 and 32×32 pixels are the usual tile sizes, but both Maxwell and Pascal can dynamically assess the required tile size for each frame, changing it on-the-fly as needed and according to the complexity of the scene. This looks to ensure that the processed data has a much smaller footprint than that of the full image rendering - small enough that it makes it possible for NVIDIA to keep the data in a much smaller amount of memory (essentially, the L2 memory), dynamically filling and flushing the available cache as possible until the full frame has been rendered. This means that the GPU doesn't have to access larger, slower memory pools as much, which primarily reduces the load on the VRAM subsystem (increasing available VRAM for other tasks), whilst simultaneously accelerating rendering speed. At the same time, a tile-based approach also lends itself pretty well to the nature of GPUs - these are easily parallelized operations, with the GPU being able to tackle many independent tiles simultaneously, depending on the available resources.

NVIDIA today unveiled the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card, its fastest consumer graphics card based on the "Pascal" GPU architecture, and which is positioned to be more affordable than the flagship TITAN X Pascal, at USD $699, with market availability from the first week of March, 2017. Based on the same "GP102" silicon as the TITAN X Pascal, the GTX 1080 Ti is slightly cut-down. While it features the same 3,584 CUDA cores as the TITAN X Pascal, the memory amount is now lower, at 11 GB, over a slightly narrower 352-bit wide GDDR5X memory interface. This translates to 11 memory chips on the card. On the bright side, NVIDIA is using newer memory chips than the one it deployed on the TITAN X Pascal, which run at 11 GHz (GDDR5X-effective), so the memory bandwidth is 484 GB/s.

Besides the narrower 352-bit memory bus, the ROP count is lowered to 88 (from 96 on the TITAN X Pascal), while the TMU count is unchanged from 224. The GPU core is clocked at a boost frequency of up to 1.60 GHz, with the ability to overclock beyond the 2.00 GHz mark. It gets better: the GTX 1080 Ti features certain memory advancements not found on other "Pascal" based graphics cards: a newer memory chip and optimized memory interface, that's running at 11 Gbps. NVIDIA's Tiled Rendering Technology has also been finally announced publicly; a feature NVIDIA has been hiding from its consumers since the GeForce "Maxwell" architecture, it is one of the secret sauces that enable NVIDIA's lead.

NVIDIA's GeForce.com website today was updated to greet us with a curious-looking countdown to evening, February 28. The countdown goes with the caption "It's Almost Time," with "Ti" in bold lettering. This just about confirms launch of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, NVIDIA's next high-end graphics card based on the same "GP102" silicon as the TITAN X Pascal. It remains to be seen if the company endows the SKU with more CUDA cores than the TITAN X Pascal, or less. A lot will depend on what NVIDIA's product managers learned about AMD's upcoming Radeon Vega.

NVIDIA could attempt to steal the limelight from AMD's 2017 "Capsaicin & Cream" launch event for its Ryzen desktop processors, slated for February 28, with a parallel GeForce GTX event along the sidelines of the 2017 Game Developers' Conference (GDC). At this event, the company is expected to launch its next enthusiast-segment graphics card, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. This could at least be a paper-launch, with market availability following through in March.

While the GTX 1080 Ti is a graphics card, and Ryzen a processor (they don't compete), NVIDIA's choice of launch-date could certainly steal some attention away from AMD's big day. Besides launching Ryzen, it wouldn't surprise us if AMD teases its upcoming Radeon "Vega" graphics cards a little more. The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is expected to be based on the same "GP102" silicon as the company's flagship TITAN X Pascal graphics card, and could be positioned very close to the USD $1,000 mark, given that NVIDIA priced the TITAN X Pascal at a wallet-scorching $1,199.

Not to be outdone by AMD, and making sure to keep the landscape populated with enough green, NVIDIA has announced its presence in the upcoming GDC 2017. Could this be the choice battleground for an announcement regarding the (now) almost mythical GTX 1080Ti?

Let's see what the company has to say: "You're invited to attend the GeForce GTX gaming celebration! Come join us for an evening of awesome PC gaming, hardware, tournaments and of course free food, drinks and a few other amazing surprises. Doors will open at 6:30 PM and the event will start promptly at 7 PM. The celebration will take place in downtown San Francisco, CA."

Let's just say that the company has history of announcing its top-of-the-line Ti models on GDC (much like it did with 2015's GTX 980 Ti), and that NVIDIA closes their announcement with a very tentative (if generic) "You won't want to miss this". And with rumors of AMD being prepared to show off its Vega architecture on the same day, as well as the expected release of its highly anticipated Ryzen CPUs, February 28th is looking out to be one of the best days of the year for enthusiasts.

After disappointing scores of potential buyers by skipping a GTX 1080 Ti announcement at CES - which could have been a last-moment decision on the company's part when AMD failed to make any relevant VEGA announcement - it looks like NVIDIA has chosen the grand stage of PAX East, which begins at March 10th, as the place to carry the previously-confirmed addition to their Pascal line of GPUs.

This information (which should be taken with a maybe unhealthy grain of salt) came to light by way of an MSI (NVIDIA's AIB partner) representative, which also mentioned that the 1080 Ti would be available from board partners (including, naturally, MSI itself) at time of launch.