CONCLUSION

   With the recent release of their GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition graphics card NVIDIA seems to be determined to dominate the enthusiast segment of the market like they have for many years now and since i was never into very expensive cards i can understand why people consider this line to be at the top right now. Performance is superb (and obviously much higher than expected by most people), power consumption is very low (not even 200W at load – even the GTX 970 used more) and overclocking potential is extremely good (10%+ boost in games is not a small amount with the FPS this card gets). Unfortunately the centrifugal blower fan although completely silent when not playing games (sometimes it doesn’t even spin) is quite loud when playing games and I can go as far to say that it’s not quite sufficient when the card is overclocked since one time during testing it switched to reduced clocks (via the Boost 3.0 feature). NVIDIA partners have already released models with 2 and even 3 fans which should offer reduced temperatures (and thus even better performance thanks to Boost 3.0) but at the same time some of those models take up 3 slots and when you have plenty of PCIe cards to install in your system (or if you want to place three cards in SLI) this is obviously not ideal. Finally as you can all see we added two more games in our benchmarks (we also planned to add the Dreadnought Beta benchmark but it's not very reliable yet) which were tested with the cards we have here and with all the latest drivers (still to not confuse people in with this in upcoming reviews we chose not to mention it earlier).

   If you look right now online you will see that purchasing the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition 8GB model is not really easy since pretty much every NVIDIA partner sells it under their brand name. Ontop of that there are many custom models out in the market now that cost even less and probably offer less temperatures and better performance across the board. Still for this specific review we need to point out that the Founder Edition currently retails for USD699.99 inside the USA (Amazon.com – ZOTAC) and for 789Euros inside the EU (Amazon.de – GAINWARD). Leaving out the noise levels and the less than “stellar” reference cooler I really can’t find anything wrong with the brand new GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition 8GB by NVIDIA (on the contrary we all are very happy with it) and that’s why it grabs our Platinum Award.

PROS

- Superior Build Quality
- Superb Performance
- Features (Fast Sync / Simultaneous Multi-Projection / Ansel / HDR / Asynchronous Compute / Boost 3.0)
- Design (For Some)
- Low Power Consumption
- Very Good Overclock Headroom
- HDMI v2.0b / 3x DisplayPort v1.4 / DVI-D
- 8GB GDDR5X

CONS

- Noise Levels At Load
- OC Temperatures
- Price (Compared To Custom Models)