Palit's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GameRock Premium is built around a new triple-slot solution that uses stacked counter-rotating fans to increase air pressure. Unlike other manufacturers which require you to fiddle with their software to switch from "Gaming" to "OC" mode, Palit has chosen to make OC mode the default, which I applaud the company for. The competition often tries to use OC clocks for marketing, but the actual stock clocks are "Gaming", which is done to keep RMA rates low and profits high because most customers will use the card as-it-is out of the box to possibly never uncover that OC mode isn't 100% stable on their card. Palit's card also includes a second BIOS which lets you enable the card's "Quiet" mode without any software involvement. Very nice.

Out of the box, the card is overclocked to a base clock of 1594 MHz (when using the default OC BIOS), which leads to a 7% performance uplift over the GTX 1080 Ti reference design. This makes the card more than 40% faster than the GTX 1080 and almost twice as fast as the GTX 1070, GTX 980 Ti, and R9 Fury X. With such performance levels, the GTX 1080 Ti is a great option for 4K gaming as it does achieve 60 FPS at the highest settings in most of our titles. Palit did not overclock the memory chips, which could have yielded a little bit of easy extra performance as these new 11 Gbps GDDR5X chips work really well and reach close to 1500 MHz - a few MHz above 1376 MHz should have been no problem.

Palit's thermal solution is built on a heatsink that cools GPU, memory chips, and voltage circuitry, combined with two fan stacks that consist of two counter-rotating fans each. Palit's marketing promises "Lower Acoustic Levels" and "Lower GPU Temperature", which may be true when compared to the NVIDIA Founders Edition. Against other custom GTX 1080 Tis we previously tested, the card doesn't stand a chance, both when looking at temperatures and noise levels. With 38 dBA during gaming, the card is 1 dBA quieter than the NVIDIA FE, but the best custom designs achieve 33 dBA only. Temperatures reach 75°C, which is sufficiently far away from the 83°C cutoff when NVIDIA Boost will reduce clocks, but significantly higher than the 69°C we saw on the ASUS STRIX, for example, which is quieter at the same time. I also tested the Quiet mode BIOS, which runs lower clocks, but still somehow ends up emitting the exact same noise levels, with similar temperatures and fan speeds. Maybe Palit should do some more BIOS tweaking.

Palit does include the idle-fan-off feature with their card, which we love so much since it provides a perfect noise-free experience during desktop work, Internet browsing, and even light gaming. I have to admit, I had high hopes for Palit's new fan-stacking approach, but it's apparently not the way to go. If it were, it would have probably been discovered and used a long time ago. Another explanation for these results could be that making room for the two stacked fans meant reducing the size of the heatsink into which the heatpipes dump the heat, which they soak up from the GPU core. The included high-quality metal backplate comes with two thermal pads which will provide a little bit of extra cooling for the VRM circuitry, on top of protecting against component damage during installation and handling.

The card does tick of a lot of feature checkboxes. For example, adjustable RGB lighting is included, and Palit also added a pinout to which you can connect additional RGB accessories, which will have them follow the color of the graphics card's own illumination. Also included are voltage measurement and tweaking points for hardcore overclockers and tweakers. The points are unmarked though, but figuring them out shouldn't be a problem for the experts.

Power consumption of Pascal is amazing, and the GTX 1080 Ti is no exception here. The overclocking and board design changes by Palit did reduce overall efficiency, though. It is roughly 15% worse than with the NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition. Some of that is expected due to the overclock out of the box, and around 280 W during gaming should be no problem anyway. The good thing is that this means upgrading the power input configuration from 6+8 to 8+8 was a justified move - it is not just for show like we've seen on other cards.

Palit's products are not available in the US. In Europe, you can find the card online for €835, which is in the same range as other high-end custom designs and is why we picked a price point of $770 for our comparison charts. At that price, the card is not cheaper and very similar in what it offers to other premium GTX 1080 Ti variants, which do run quieter and cooler though. Still, if you are not overly concerned with noise, the Palit GTX 1080 Ti GameRock is an amazing card with tons of performance for an awesome gaming experience.