Asus ROG Strix GTX 1080
All the bark, yet no bite
ASUS IS THE FIRST add-in-board (AIB) partner to use a fully autonomous manufacturing line. From start to finish, each and every card has zero human interaction. In short, it’s meant to eliminate human error, reduce the amount of solder, and improve performance. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take into account the greatest equalizer of them all: the silicon lottery. Our GeForce GTX 1080 Strix sample was, if we’re honest, woeful. At its default “overclock” setting (configured in the new and improved GPU Tweak), it performed well, achieving a suitably comfortable overclock of 2,025MHz on the core clock. Unfortunately, it simply couldn’t hold it for the duration of our testing session, and it continually crashed our As he soft he Singularity benchmark run, even after a completely fresh install of Windows and its associated drivers.
The overclocking experience, which should be exceptional on a card like this, was equally frustrating. After 16 separate attempts to get the card to clock any higher than its overclock settings, we managed a not-so-impressive improvement of a meager 20MHz, and it still wasn’t stable in the vast majority of our benchmarks. For a card at this price, and with Asus’s legendary build and quality control, we expected more, and when our (admittedly most likely cherry-picked) reference sample GTX 1080 can outperform it by 113MHz, it just compounds the frustration.
That aside, it’s possible we were just unlucky. It’s still a quiet card—the fans won’t spin up until the GPU is under load, and they never venture above and beyond 40 percent of total fan speed. The Strix sits at around 70 C under load, but that’s well within operating parameters. Although the LED feature set isn’t something we particularly care for here at Maximum PC, it’s a nice feature to have for those looking to build a colorco-ordinated build, and performance is as solid as any other GTX 1080.
VERDICT6
Asus ROG Strix GTX 1080
EAGLE Quiet; stylish design; GTX 1080 performance.
SEAGULL Crashes in OC mode; poor overclocking; chip-dependent; pricey.
$710, www.asus.com