GIGABYTE AORUS GEFORCE GTX 1080 TI XTREME EDITION 11G
Aorus’ take on the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti stands out for its particularly thoughtful cooling system. The card is outfitted with three 100mm fans, but unlike the GALAX, it make the length more manageable by employing a stacked design.
The middle fan is slightly recessed, and the other two fans overlap it. While this is still a fairly long card, any e ort to make it less unwieldy is definitely welcome.
The center WindForce fan also spins in the opposite direction from the other two, supposedly to better optimize airflow.
In addition, there’s a large cutout on the metal backplate that exposes a distinctive copper plate. This copper plate sandwiches the GPU between it and a separate copper heatsink that is in direct contact with the chip. This two work in tandem to cool the GPU, so while the heatsink draws heat away from the GPU, the copper plate helps dissipate heat from the chip’s package.
The copper heatsink is also quite large, and it acts to cool the memory modules that surround the GP102 GPU as well.
In addition, there is further thermal padding on the backplate itself, so it functions as more than just a structural support, and actually helps with passive cooling for the board’s other components.
Furthermore, the copper GPU heatsink is one part of a two-part design, and there’s a second large heatsink for the voltage regulation components, chokes, and capacitors. Some of the other cards don’t have as large a heatsink for those parts, so this is definitely a plus for the Aorus card.
This may also be the card to get if you have a VR headset, and it comes with a total of three HDMI ports, one of which sits at the front of the card. If you also run your monitor o HDMI and want to do VR, this could turn out quite useful.
And while Aorus is claiming to feature a total of 12 phases for the GPU, there are just six real phases, and we once again see the use of phase doublers to create 12 control circuits.