The Card

NVIDIA's GTX 1080 Ti cooler design is identical to that of the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition. The side has an illuminated "GeForce GTX" logo. On the back, you will find the same backplate as on the GTX 1080, which can be partially removed to improve airflow for SLI. Dimensions of the card are 27 cm x 11 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include an HDMI port and three DisplayPorts. The DVI port has been removed completely, but NVIDIA includes a DisplayPort to DVI adapter in the package. With Pascal, NVIDIA also updated DisplayPort to be 1.2 certified and 1.3/1.4 ready, which enables support for 4K @ 120 Hz and 5K @ 60 Hz or 8K @ 60 Hz with two cables.

The GPU also comes with an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 2.0b compatible, which supports HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies. The GPU video encoding unit has been updated to support HEVC at 10-bit and 12-bit.


With Pascal, NVIDIA made some changes to how SLI works. In a nutshell, for 4K at 60 Hz and above, NVIDIA recommends new high-bandwidth SLI bridges it dubbed "SLI HB." These bridges occupy both SLI fingers. Traditional triple- and quad-SLI setups are gone as well. Only certain benchmarks can run more than the dual-SLI setup to which all games are limited.


Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back).