ZOTAC GTX 1080 Ti MINI Review

Are you a system builder looking to create a powerful mini-ITX configuration? The GTX 1080 Ti MINI is the world’s smallest 1080 Ti, making it perfect for small form factor set ups.

Product on Review: GTX 1080 Ti MINI Graphics Card
Manufacturer & Sponsor: ZOTAC
Street Price: £689 GBP / $800 USD

Building a system inside a mini-ITX enclosure has always had its challenges and compromises. One such compromise which is fundamental for 3D performance is the graphics card and the small form factor environment lends itself to being restricted to specific low-mid range options.

So, when we heard that ZOTAC had created a GTX 1080 Ti under their “MINI” series, we were rather excited and intrigued. The introduction of such a graphics card is likely to transform the capabilities of any small form factor PC and will extinguish any compromises that once existed.

In the spotlight today we have the ZOTAC GTX 1080 Ti MINI. Touted as the world’s smallest GTX 1080 Ti, this graphics card has a footprint unlike any of NVIDIA’s flagship designs. Measuring in at just 211mm in length, compared to rival offerings (which in some cases exceed 300mm) this card will squeeze into the smallest of mini-ITX chassis and allow gamers to take advantage of the highest performance available.

Can such a small graphics card still offer great 3D performance? Decent cooling figures? Low noise? Let’s find out!

ZOTAC on their MINI

NVIDIA’s new flagship GeForce® GTX 1080 Ti is the most advanced gaming GPU on the planet, driven by the high-performance, power-efficient new NVIDIA Pascal™ architecture. All that performance is now contained in a compact size, enabling top performance even in smaller builds.

Technical Specifications

Below are the technical specifications surrounding GTX 1080 Ti MINI, supplied directly by ZOTAC:

GPU
GeForce® GTX 1080
CUDA cores
3584
Video Memory
11GB GDDR5X
Memory Bus
352-bit
Engine Clock
Base: 1506 MHz
Boost: 1620 MHz
Memory Clock
11 Gbps
PCI Express
3.0
Display Outputs
3x DisplayPort 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
1x DL-DVI
Recommended Power Supply
600W
DirectX
12 API feature level 12_1
OpenGL
4.5
Cooling
Dual fan – Arctic Storm (90/100mm fans)
Slot Size
Double slot
Supported OS
Windows 10 / 8 / 7
Card Length
211mm x 125mm x 41mm
Accessories
2 x Dual 6-pin to 8-pin adapter
Quick Install Guide
Driver Disk

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:
ZOTAC GTX 1080 Ti MINI (NVIDIA 384.76)
AORUS GTX 1080 Ti XTREME (NVIDIA 381.65)
NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti (NVIDIA 378.78)
AORUS GTX 1080 XTREME (NVIDIA 378.66)
GIGABYTE GTX 1080 G1 GAMING (NVIDIA 372.54)
ZOTAC GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme (NVIDIA 368.81)
ASUS STRIX GTX 1080 (NVIDIA 368.81)

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

In our video review of this graphics card we have a demonstration of the sound levels that can be expected. Fan speed during gaming usage typically sees the fans operate at 50% (1500RPM) under auto mode. Fan noise is noticeable but not particularly disruptive.

Overclocking

To overclock the GTX 1080 Ti MINI we used the MSI Afterburner Tool since it gives extensive options for modifying the GPU and memory clock.

We were quite surprised by the MINI – there appears to be quite a bit of headroom for nudging up the clock speeds. Our best overclock saw us reach 1745MHz on the GPU boost clock and 1439MHz for the memory. This represents a 10% increase for the GPU clock boost over the reference NVIDIA settings and 5% increase in the memory clock speed. 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

NVIDIA’s flagship GTX 1080 Ti has been limited to large, mid-full tower configurations up until now but with the introduction of ZOTAC’s GTX 1080 Ti MINI, things are about to change.

The condensed dimensions to which MINI has been engineered to make it the ideal graphics card for those building inside a small form factor enclosure. System builders with the objective of utilising a compact Mini-ITX set up have, been restricted to GPUs like the 1050, 1060, 1070 but now even such a platform can reap the benefits of NVIDIA’s high-performance offering. As things stand (at the time of writing this article) ZOTAC has the only GTX 1080 Ti which can be used in such a setting – enabling them to lay hold on the claim of the world’s smallest GTX 1080 Ti. A position which will no doubt allow them to monopolize – at least for the moment!

ZOTAC has recently performed a revamp on their graphics cards by moving away from the signature yellow theme and instead, have opted for a neutral livery on all of the options available. MINI therefore uses a gunmetal finish; which will suit a large majority of users. The idea behind this rebrand is to appeal to a wider audience rather than causing potential buyers to go elsewhere, which is what specific-coloured hardware can cause.

As can be expected from a GTX 1080 Ti, the MINI presents us with excellent performance regardless of the title or resolution. ZOTAC has applied a minor factory overclock to the GPU core which isn’t particularly exciting but it still manages to push the card beyond the Founders Edition. If users are happy to indulge in a bit of manual overclocking themselves, MINI can be pushed further – we managed to modify the GPU clock speed to realise a 10% increase and the memory clock a 5% increase. Again, a greater overclock to both these attributes will allow users to tap into even better performance in 3D environments.

Our overall experience with this graphics card was positive but there are a few areas of concern which should be highlighted. Due to the footprint, ZOTAC has obviously had a rather tough and challenging time creating a heatsink which is capable of handling the heat generated from the GPU (GP102) and other components. The Arctic Storm cooler which sits on MINI isn’t able to deliver the same results that larger counterparts offer. Temperatures will hit around 80 degrees after 30 minutes of gaming with the fans set to “auto” – at this temperature the fan speed sat around 50% and the fans spin at 1500RPM, and going beyond this will inevitably create more noise.

At a cost of £689 GBP / $800 USD, this might not be the fastest or coolest GTX 1080 Ti but it certainly is the smallest and as our MINI is backed by a huge 5 years’ warranty – it’s a great option if you’re a gamer who sees Mini-ITX as the only pathway.

MINI might be the world’s smallest GTX 1080 Ti but it breaks convention by delivering big performance. ZOTAC has indeed beaten rival NVIDIA partners to it and this graphics card will be very popular among small form factor advocates.

VIDEO REVIEW – VORTEZ TV

Pros
+ Neutral design
+ Small footprint – great for Mini-ITX
+ Solid construction
+ Excellent performance
+ Ready for 4K/VR
+ Comes with a factory overclock
+ Can be manually overclocked easily
+ 5-year warranty

Cons
– Plastic shroud
– Gets very warm under load

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