Introduction

NVIDIA is shaping up to be the most consistent chipmaker in the industry when it comes to per-generation performance and energy efficiency gains. Over the past three generations, spread across the past four years, the company successfully developed increasingly more energy efficient GPUs, which sees its culmination with the Pascal architecture that powers the GeForce GTX 1080 we are reviewing today.

The GeForce GTX 1080 is based on NVIDIA's "Pascal" architecture. This architecture sees the streaming multiprocessors (SMs), the indivisible subunits of an NVIDIA GPU, get even more dedicated components, which increases their performance. NVIDIA claims to have "meticulously" designed the GPU architecture to be as energy efficient as possible given the silicon fab node and is leveraging the 16 nm FinFET node at TSMC for "Pascal."

The GTX 1080 features more CUDA cores than its predecessor – 2560 vs. 2048. It features even more TMUs (160 vs. 128) and, at 8 GB, double the memory. Memory technology sees a major update with NVIDIA's adoption of the GDDR5X memory standard. The memory is clocked at a staggering 10 GHz effective, which gives the GPU 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth over a 256-bit wide memory interface.

To learn more about the architecture and new GeForce features, check out our launch-day review of the GeForce GTX 1080.



In this review, we're taking a look at the Palit GTX 1080 GameRock Premium Edition which comes with a brand-new triple-slot, dual-fan thermal solution. This triple-slot approach, if done correctly, should provide phenomenal noise levels at excellent temperatures. There are three different versions available of the Palit GTX 1080 GameRock, the "Premium Edition + G-Panel" (this review), the "Premium Edition", which comes without G-Panel, and just the "GTX 1080 GameRock", which runs at a comparatively lower GPU and memory overclock.

In terms of clocks, Palit has overclocked both memory and GPU out of the box (on the Premium Edition). The GPU runs at a base clock of 1746 MHz, up from the NVIDIA default of 1607 MHz. Memory runs at 1315 MHz. The non-Premium clocks are 1645 MHz to the GPU and 1250 MHz to the memory.

Many of you certainly know Palit's Jetstream cards. Also triple-slot designs, they sit intermixed with the GameRock branding in terms of performance and pricing. The GTX 1080 GameRock Premium in this review is Palit's highest-clocked GTX 1080.

Palit products are currently not available in the US. The Premium Edition + G-Panel retails at €799 (all including VAT), the Premium without the G-Panel sits at €779, and the regular GameRock goes for €719. For comparison, the Founders Edition retails at €729. We converted the €799 price tag to $740, which is not exactly cheap!