With GameRock, Palit is introducing a new series to their lineup. The new cards are marketed to gamers as the name suggests, even though I find it difficult to find a clear separation to the existing JetStream and Super JetStream cards. They all are triple-slot, they all have RGB lighting, they all have various clock ranges. Today, we are reviewing Palit's flagship, the "GTX 1080 GameRock Premium + G-Panel." It bundles Palit's new G-Panel gadget we first saw at Computex in June with the card, and has the card comes with a large overclock on both the GPU and memory.

Out of the box, the card comes overclocked to a base clock of 1746 MHz versus the 1607 MHz on the reference design. This translates into an average clock of 1994 MHz versus the 1783 MHz on NVIDIA's reference design after GPU Boost 3.0 is applied. This is certainly one of the highest out-of-the-box clocks of all GTX 1080 cards; the Zotac AMP Extreme may go a little bit higher, which we'll know soon enough. That clock increase translates into 9% additional performance when averaged out over our benchmark suite. This makes the card 35% faster than the GTX 1070 reference and 50% faster than GTX 970 SLI! AMD's fastest, the Fury X, is out of the game, almost 50% slower. Palit has also overclocked their memory chips for a bit of extra performance.

The included G-Panel accessory is very well engineered; it uses a dot-matrix LCD instead of a multi-segment display, which gives it much more flexibility in what information can be presented. No matter whether sitting on your desk or in a 5.25" drive bay, the G-Panel looks clean, is easily readable from all angles and does what it's expected to do perfectly. It provides real-time information on your graphics card and its operating parameters, like fan speed and temperature. It would have been nice if you could also use it to change settings, e.g. profiles or similar.

Palit has opted for a triple-slot cooler for all their GeForce 1070 and 1080 cards, which is an interesting choice. I've been a fan of triple-slot cooler for years - as long as they are properly engineered, which results in less noise and lower temperatures than a two-slot design. Palit's thermal solution certainly delivers here. Gaming temperature is around 72°C, which is sufficiently far away from NVIDIA's thermal limit of 82°C beyond which the card will reduce clocks to hold that temperature. In terms of gaming noise, the Palit GameRock delivers, too. With 30 dBA, it is the quietest GTX 1080 we tested so far, slightly quieter than the MSI Gaming X, which uses a dual-slot cooler, though. Palit 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. However, when taking a closer look at the heatsink, we noticed a lot of unused space under the shroud, which suggests that this cooler is also cheaper to make than complex dual-slot coolers which are not so far behind (if we compare it to the MSI Gaming X).

Just like on the reference design, power efficiency of Pascal is amazing, with huge improvements over the Maxwell architecture that is already highly efficient in the first place. However, it looks as though Palit traded some efficiency for more performance, which isn't unreasonable and something all manufacturers of custom cards do. Compared to the reference design, we see about 40 W more power draw in gaming, which translates into around a 20% loss in performance per watt. I say no big deal as Pascal is so efficient the power is well spent, and a worst-case power draw scenario of 225 W is still much lower than that of any other high-end card we've seen before; and the card is nearly silent anyway due to its excellent thermal solution and well-crafted fan profile.
Unlike the reference design, which only uses a single 8-pin power connector for the sake of convenience, the Palit GTX 1080 GameRock requires the 8-pin and another 6-pin connector, which is reasonable since the card's power draw can get close to the 225 W limit even without overclocking. According to our testing, Palit has set the board power limit to 205 W only, which is too low when looking at our gaming power measurements. I am quite sure that additional performance could be unlocked by a higher power limit of, say, 250 W, which would still be well within the card's power delivery capabilities of 300 W.

Palit's card also ticks a lot of other checkboxes. It, for example, has a dual-BIOS which will protect you against a failed BIOS flash, and the PCB comes with voltage measurement and tuning points for those modders who are not afraid of a soldering iron. Software-controlled RGB lighting is included too, and it can be disabled if that's the color you like best.
Overclocking potential of the card is similar to what we've seen on other GTX 1080 cards; GPU max overclock sits at around 2100 MHz and maximum memory frequency is 1400 MHz. This means that the out-of-the-box overclock eats into the manual OC headroom should you choose to do so. This is a reality on all custom design GTX 1070 and 1080 cards. The manufacturer will basically do some overclocking for you, providing some convenience and peace of mind by the way of a warranty.

Unfortunately, Palit's cards are not available in the United States, which is why we converted the €799 Euro pricing (which includes 20% VAT) into $740 for our comparisons. $740 is really a ton of money for a GTX 1080 as it is $40 more expensive than the Founders Edition. You do get a fantastic card with an excellent heatsink that delivers on temperatures and noise; G-Panel is also included. Palit also offers a variant of the GameRock Premium without the G-Panel, which saves you around 20 bucks, and then there is the GameRock non-Premium, which is slightly cheaper than the NVIDIA GTX 1080 Founders Edition. It comes with lower clocks (just overclock yourself), but still keeps the excellent triple-slot cooler and its super-awesome fan profile. Unless you absolutely plan on using SLI, the triple-slot design shouldn't be an issue, and with more and more games having lousy multi-GPU support or not scaling at all, I'm not sure whether you even want SLI.