Another day, another GTX 1080 review, this time from Gigabyte who sent us their G1 Gaming targeting more affordable price levels while still offering all the benefits of a custom design that fully addresses all the shortcomings of the Founders Edition for less!

Out of the box, the card comes overclocked to a base clock of 1696 MHz versus the 1607 MHz on the reference design. This translates into an average clock of 1906 MHz versus the 1783 MHz on NVIDIA's reference design after Boost 3.0 is applied. While I'm sure this is not the highest out-of-the-box overclock we will see, it's a good amount, translating into 6% additional performance when averaged out over our benchmark suite. This makes the card 29% faster than the GTX 1070 reference and 45% faster than GTX 970 SLI! AMD's fastest, the Fury X, is out of the game, almost 50% slower. Gigabyte did not overclock their memory chips, which could have yielded a little bit of easy extra performance as we've seen all GDDR5X chips so far reach around 1400 MHz - a few MHz above 1251 MHz should have been no problem.

Most people have without a doubt been waiting for custom designs to see if their coolers will offer better capabilities than the NVIDIA reference design heatsink, which looks good, but fails to keep the card from running at its full potential due to throttling beyond 82°C. Gigabyte's updated WindForce 3X heatsink does a great job here. It keeps the card at around 70°C even during heavy gaming while its fans are much quieter than on the reference. While not nearly as quiet as the MSI Gaming X we tested yesterday, the noise level difference is notable. Gigabyte has also included the idle-fan-off feature we love so much since it provides a perfect noise-free experience during desktop work, Internet browsing, and even light gaming.

Just like on the reference design, power efficiency is amazing, with huge improvements over the Maxwell architecture that is already highly efficient in the first place. However, it looks as though Gigabyte traded some efficiency for more performance, which isn't unreasonable. Compared to the reference design, we see about 35 W more power draw in gaming, which translates into around a 15% loss in performance per watt. I say no big deal, Pascal is so efficient the power is well spent. Due to the card's 8-pin power input (which is fine in my opinion), the power limit is set to 215 W, up from 185 W on the reference design, so there is extra headroom for Boost 3.0 to boost higher for longer.

Currently, the Gigabyte GTX 1080 G1 Gaming retails at $649, which is a much more sane price than the $719 in yesterday's MSI review. Still, it's not anywhere close to the NVIDIA MSRP price of $599 NVIDIA announced so proudly, though it's a step in the right direction. Since the Founders Edition is $699, the Gigabyte GTX 1080 G1 Gaming should be a no-brainer for everyone who's looking for more value than the FE. The card comes with a decent overclock out of the box, the cooler is much better than on the FE, idle-fan off is included, and there are RGB LEDs if you want them. If you look at our price-to-performance chart, the Gigabyte G1 Gaming is actually pretty much the same performance-per-dollar as a reference GTX 1080 would be at $599 pricing.