AORUS GTX 1080 XTREME Edition Review

GIGABYTE’s AORUS division has released their first graphics card; GV-N1080AORUS X-8GD aka GTX 1080 XTREME carries the WindForce Stack 3X and a substantial factory overclock.

Product on Review: AORUS GTX 1080 XTREME Edition
Manufacturer & Sponsor: GIGABYTE
Street Price: £650 GBP / $800 USD

AORUS is a name which is strongly associated with gaming laptops and although the brand has operated as a separate entity, some may be surprised to discover that AORUS has in fact been a subsidiary of GIGABYTE for many years. But, a reconfiguration has since taken place – last month with the release of the Intel Z270 chipset, AORUS unveiled their new lineup of motherboards and today we’ll be taking a look at their first graphics card to appear using this new branding. As you’ll see, they’ve jumped straight into the deep end.

In the spotlight today is the AORUS GTX 1080 XTREME. The eagle eyed among you will see a key resemblance to the GIGABYTE’s mighty GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming – both cards are indeed very similar, though there are subtle differences which are mainly seen with the cooling configuration and of course the minor adjustments to the styling.

The clock speeds are identical between the XTREME and XG – placing this card as one of the fastest currently occupying the top tier segment. AORUS has applied factory overclocks to the GPU and memory and there are even some additional HDMI ports at the end of the card for VR users.

AORUS on their graphics cards

AORUS graphics cards are crafted for perfection in pursuit of the ultimate graphics experience for gaming enthusiasts. Based on the revolutionary NVIDIA® Pascal™ GPU architecture, AORUS graphics card brings you incredible gaming experience.

Technical Specifications

Below are the technical specifications surrounding GTX 1080 XTREME, supplied directly by AORUS:

GPU
GeForce® GTX 1080
CUDA cores
2560
Video Memory
8GB GDDR5X
Memory Bus
256-bit
Engine Clock
Base: 1784 MHz
Boost: 1936 MHz
Memory Clock
10.4 Gbps
PCI Express
3.0
Display Outputs
3x DisplayPort 1.4
4x HDMI 2.0b
1x DL-DVI
Recommended Power Supply
500W
DirectX
12 API feature level 12_1
OpenGL
4.5
Cooling
Triple fan – WindForce Stack 3X (100mm fans)
Slot Size
Triple slot
Supported OS
Windows 10 / 8 / 7
Card Length
285mm x 125mm x 60mm
Accessories
AORUS member club registration guide
Graphics card quick guide
AORUS metal sticker
PCI-E Power cable x1 (Two 6pin to 8 pin)
Driver CD

Detailed Look & Video Review

For this review we’ve produced a video review over on our YouTube channel which details all of the included features, and takes a close look at the PCB/cooling solution along with the addition of some gaming benchmarks. Please check out our video review or hit play on the video below:

Test Setup & Methodology

How we test graphics cards

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphics card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

Hardware

Taking Intel’s High-End Desktop platform, our hardware utilises the Intel X99 chipset. Combined with this we use the Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to a realistic and achievable 4GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB (4x4GB) of DDR4 at 2666MHz and a 750GB SSD there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

High End Graphics Cards on test:
AORUS GTX 1080 XTREME (NVIDIA 378.66)
ASUS STRIX GTX 1060 (NVIDIA 376.33)
ASUS STRIX GTX 1070 (NVIDIA 372.54)
GIGABYTE GTX 1060 G1 GAMING (NVIDIA 372.54)
GIGABYTE GTX 1070 G1 GAMING (NVIDIA 372.54)
GIGABYTE GTX 1080 G1 GAMING (NVIDIA 372.54)
PowerColor RED DEVIL RX 470(Crimson 16.8.1)
PowerColor RED DEVIL RX 480 (Crimson 16.7.2)
ZOTAC GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme (NVIDIA 368.81)
ASUS STRIX GTX 1080 (NVIDIA 368.81)
Gainward GTX 1070 Phoenix Golden Sample (NVIDIA 368.81)
MSI GTX 1060 Gaming X (NVIDIA 368.64)
Gainward GTX 1060 Phoenix Golden Sample (NVIDIA 368.64)
NVIDIA GTX 1060 (NVIDIA 368.64)
NVIDIA GTX 980Ti OC (NVIDIA 368.81)
NVIDIA GTX 980 (NVIDIA 368.81)
NVIDIA GTX 970 (NVIDIA 368.81)
AMD Radeon RX 480 CrossFire (Crimson 16.7.2)
AMD Radeon RX 480 (Crimson 16.7.2)
XFX R9 FURY (Crimson 16.7.2)
AMD Radeon R9 390X (Crimson 16.7.2)

Special thanks go to Epiphan, Intel, Corsair, MSI and AOC for providing the extreme spec components used for our test bench:

Motherboard: MSI X99A Workstation
CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition @ 4GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair LPX Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 2666MHz 16-17-17-35 C1
Power Supply – CORSAIR HX1050
Hard Drive – Samsung 840 EVO 750GB
Cooler – CORSAIR Hydro Series™ H105 240mm Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
Monitor – AOC 28″ 4K U2879VF
Capture Card – Epiphan AV.io 4K

Benchmarks
If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we’ve chosen:

DOOM (OpenGL 4.5 & Vulkan)
Total War: Warhammer
Rise of the Tomb Raider
HITMAN
DiRT Rally

To capture framerates we use a combination of in-game benchmark tools, FRAPS and PresentMon.

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included three of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:

Unigine: Valley
Unigine: Heaven 4
Futuremark 3DMark Firestrike
Futuremark 3DMark Time Spy

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Power, Temperatures, Acoustics

To test for power consumption, we take a measurement from the plug socket. It is important to note that the figures below represent total system power use and not just the GPU. The CPU was always in a fixed state (4GHz overclock) so did not affect the additional power load when the GPU was placed under 100% load using Heaven 4.0 which was ran for 20 minutes at which point a load reading was taken. Idle readings were taken 5 minutes after system boot to ensure any background services and applications had loaded.

Temperature

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests we set Heaven 4.0 running continuously for ~30 minutes recorded the peak/maximum GPU temperature.

Acoustics

Although the WindForce Stack x3 carries a triple fan arrangement (100mm), there is actually very little noise emitted during full-load. The fans spin at around 49% during gaming and will cease from spinning when idle.

Overclocking

To overclock the XTREME we used the MSI Afterburner Tool since it gives extensive options for modifying the GPU and memory clock.

Overclocking the card was relatively easy – there is moderate headroom for pushing the frequencies up, even further than the factory overclock. Our result took the GPU clock up to 1903MHz (2042MHz Boost) and modifying the memory clock up to 1361MHz. By tweaking both these elements of the card, we are able to tap into better 3D performance. Below is an example of how the overclock compares to the stock settings in Unigine Heaven 4.0.

DX12: 3DMark Time Spy

With its pure DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, 3DMark Time Spy is the ideal benchmark for testing the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards.

DX11: 3DMark FireStrike

Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is Futuremark’s most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.

DX11: Unigine Heaven 4.0

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms.

DX11: Unigine Valley

Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.

DX12: DOOM OpenGL 4.5

By default DOOM utilises an OpenGL 4.5 renderer, and is one of relatively few Windows PC titles to not use DirectX 12. It tests how well NVIDIA and AMD’s GPUs deal with a less mainstream approach, especially in regards to driver optimisations, and like all of id titles stretches graphics quality to the limit.

DX12: DOOM Vulkan

id have also released an optional Vulkan rendering path for DOOM. This API is a development of AMD’s Mantle low level which has been taken on board by the Kronos Group for implementation as the next generation of Open graphics APIs. Like DirectX 12 Vulkan is capable of Asynchronous Compute in specific configurations.

DX12: Total War: WARHAMMER

Total War: WARHAMMER is a pseudo Real-Time Strategy title which leverages DirectX 12 to render huge numbers of complex units on screen at any one time.

DX12: Rise of the Tomb Raider

Square Enix’s Rise of the Tomb Raider is the sequel to 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot. An enormously challenging title graphically, the developers also released an optional DirectX 12 render path for Windows 10 users. Although it has undergone a number of iterations this rendering pathway notably doesn’t currently utilise the full capabilities of DirectX 12.

DX12: HITMAN

Yet another DirectX 12 title, 2016’s Hitman from Square Enix and developer IO Interactive has a more robust DirectX 12 implementation than Rise of the Tomb Raider. We’ve tested at a full range of resultions, from 1080p through to 4K, which provides a look at the impact of GPU speed and memory utilisation.

DX11: DiRT Rally

Overall Performance

Here we take a look at the overall performance of the graphics card. This figure is determined by finding the average FPS across all of the settings used in a particular benchmark(game) to give us an overall value.

Value For Money

We make a simple calculation for this set of results. For each game we add all of the resulting FPS totals together and then divide by the four sets to give us an overall performance figure. While the figures alone do not give you an accurate picture of how the card will perform in any given scenario, they do tell you, when averaged, which GPU is the more capable across all of the benchmarks and settings tested.

Conclusion

Gamers who are on a quest to obtain a graphic card which generates astounding performance should look no further than the AORUS GTX 1080 XTREME, it delivers up something rather special which should be fairly evident from our video review.

You’d be right to give the XTREME a double-take, it does indeed share a significant likeness to that of GIGABYTE’s already released GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming. The truth is that AORUS will now take over from XG and offer the premium products – similar to ASUS Republic of Gamers. So, there are few differences between the two GTX 1080s from GIGABYTE – it mainly boils down to a modification to the cooling solution, some styling and of course the handy inclusion of twin HDMI 2.0 ports at the end of the graphics card.

We found the XTREME to offer some of the lowest temperatures from a GTX 1080 bearing such an overclock, so the efficiency and design philosophy behind the cooling module on the backplate and large copper surface area works.

Carrying a substantial overclock to the GPU and memory means that XTREME is able to tap into some of the best performance that a GTX 1080 can offer. It simply excelled in all of the games we tested it in, so if you’re gaming at 1080p, 1440p or even 4K, fps isn’t compromised on. Having such an overclock does mean however there isn’t a huge amount of room for pushing those frequencies up even further with a manual overclock but most users should be satisfied with the already impressive factory settings.

Having access to such a top-performer will hit your pocket quite hard – the XTREME can be purchased for £650 GBP / $800 USD – making it one of the more expensive GTX 1080s out there. However, there is a generous 4-year warranty available with this card and the results really do speak for themselves.

XTREME is a word which aptly describes the first graphics card from AORUS. It pushes the boundaries for outright performance both on the cooling front and in-game fps figures!

VIDEO REVIEW – VORTEZ TV

Pros
+ Attractive design
+ Impressive lighting system
+ Includes two additional HDMI 2.0 ports
+ Factory overclock to GPU and memory
+ One of the coolest GTX 1080s
+ Excellent performance
+ DirectX 12 ready
+ Reasonable price
+ 4-year warranty

Cons
– Large
– Heavy

Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.