Introduction

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 was released 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.



Today, we have with us for review the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme Edition. The company's flagship GTX 1080, it uses a huge triple-slot cooler, premium components, and high clocks out of the box.

With a price of $689, the card is roughly $100 more expensive than the cheapest GTX 1080.