The Card

NVIDIA has refreshed their cooler design to a more edgy look by putting polygon surfaces on the cooler, which was smooth before. It takes a while to get used to, but looks alright once you have. On the back, you find a very thin, metal backplate that covers the whole card. Part of it is removable, but more on that later. Dimensions of the card are 27.0 cm x 11.0 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include a DVI port, an HDMI port, and three DisplayPorts. Unlike previous NVIDIA cards, the DVI port no longer includes the analog signal, so you'll have to use an active adapter. NVIDIA also updated DisplayPort to be 1.2 certified and 1.3/1.4 ready, which enables support for 4K at 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 and 12-bit.


NVIDIA made some changes to SLI; read more about those changes on the GeForce Pascal Features page of this review. In a nutshell, for 4K at 60 Hz and above, NVIDIA recommends new high-bandwidth SLI bridges called "SLI HB" which occupy both SLI fingers. Traditional triple- and quad-SLI setups are still possible, but not a focus of NVIDIA anymore, which rather prefers to optimize around two-way SLI. Users who want to unlock triple- and quad-SLI can do so by requesting a key through NVIDIA's website.


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