The Card

Gigabyte uses a black color scheme with a large cooler that has three fans. Dimensions of the card are 29.5 x 13.0 cm.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a, one HDMI 2.0b, and a VirtualLink connector, which is basically USB-C with DisplayPort routing and USB-PD, so a single cable can power, display, and take input from your VR HMD.

NVIDIA has updated their display engine with the Turing microarchitecture, which now supports DisplayPort 1.4a with support for VESA's nearly lossless Display Stream Compression (DSC). Combined, this enables support for 8K@30Hz using a single cable, or 8K@60Hz when DSC is turned on. For context, DisplayPort 1.4a is the latest version of the standard that was published in April, 2018.


The board uses one 6-pin and one 8-pin power connector. This input configuration is specified for up to 300 watts of power draw.


With Turing, NVIDIA is using NVLink as a physical layer for its next-generation SLI technology. NVLink provides sufficient bandwidth for multi-GPU rendering at 8K 60 Hz, 4K 120 Hz, and other such bandwidth-heavy display resolutions. It's a point-to-point link between your GPUs, and so latencies will be lower compared to pushing data through the PCI-Express bus.


We shine the light from a self-leveling line laser on to the card, which shows a little bit of sagging, which is nothing to worry about.

Disassembly

Gigabyte is using six copper heatpipes that make direct contact with the chip surface to quickly transport heat away from the GPU.


The backplate is made from metal to protect the card against damage during handling and installation. Thermal pads convey heat to the backplate from behind the VRM, memory, and GPU, so it helps offload some of it.

On the next page, we dive deep into the PCB layout and VRM configuration.