Introduction

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 was released earlier this summer and impressed with incredible performance and even more incredible power efficiency. 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.



Today, we have the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 AMP! Edition on our test bench, the company's second-highest clocked custom-design GTX 1080. Zotac's other models are the AMP! Extreme, which comes with a bigger cooler and higher clocks, Arctic Storm, which is designed for watercooling, and the Founders Edition reference design.

Zotac uses a dual-slot, dual fan cooler on the GTX 1080 AMP! Edition, which is almost completely made out of metal, giving the card a high-quality look and feel. Priced at $670, which is around $30 cheaper than the Founders Edition, it is one of the cheaper GTX 1080s out there.