Zotac's GTX 1080 Mini is the most compact GTX 1080 card available, which makes it a prime candidate for a compact high-end gaming system. The card comes with a relatively conservative overclock out of the box: +13 MHz to base clock, which actually turns into a 39 MHz average clock increase over the Founders Edition after the effects of Boost are taken into account. As a result, at 1440p, the card is 5% faster when compared to the latter. Against the GTX 1070, the performance uplift is 25%, and the GTX 1080 Ti is 23% faster. AMD's currently fastest card, the R9 Fury X, is 31% slower. It would have been nice if Zotac had overclocked their memory chips, too, for an additional performance increase.

Zotac's thermal solution builds upon a dual-slot, dual-fan approach it paired with a four heatpipe heatsink that also cools the memory chips and VRM circuitry. The cooler does a good job at keeping the card cool - there is no thermal throttling. Temperatures under heavy gaming reach 67°C, which should be sufficient headroom, even for smaller cases. Unfortunately, noise levels are quite high; the Zotac GTX 1080 Mini is actually the noisiest GTX 1080 we have tested. Zotac's card also lacks the idle-fan-off feature that provides the ultimate noise-free experience during light gaming, media playback, desktop work, and Internet browsing. I consider this feature essential for any modern graphics card, even more so for a card that's small form factor and could end up in a low-noise media PC. Idle temperatures are very good too; it seems Zotac was scared of the card overheating in small cases. But with the fans starting at a certain temperature if idle fan off were implemented, wouldn't they just turn on in such a situation? Zotac's official response is that it was not possible to place a microcontroller for the idle-fan-off feature on the PCB due to its compact footprint.

Unlike some of the higher-clocked custom GTX 1080 designs, the Zotac Mini uses only slightly more power during gaming than the Founders Edition, which is good because any additional power will turn into heat that could become a problem for a smaller case with little airflow. Overall power efficiency of Pascal is amazing, and the Zotac board is no exception here. I do like the single 8-pin power input on the card, which makes installation and cable routing much easier, especially when you have little room to work with, like in most SFF cases.

The card is currently listed for $540 online even though its normal price is $515, which is probably due to some price inflation because of mining yet again. At that price point, the card is only marginally more expensive than the cheapest GTX 1080 you can find ($500). If you are in the market for a small form factor build, you should definitely consider this card, and maybe use a custom fan profile to make the fans stop in idle and media playback. If you are betting on the recently teased Radeon RX Vega Nano to be a big winner, I'm not sure if it'll be worth the wait. The card will almost certainly be more expensive than the Zotac Mini and will probably come with similar performance, if even that. Also, AMD's power efficiency is much worse than Pascal's, which either means tons of throttling at the cost of performance or higher temperatures and more noise, especially in a small case.