PNY GeForce GTX 1080 XLR8 OC
Overclocked? That’s a matter of opinion
PERHAPS IT’S BECAUSE we’ve been receiving cherry-picked GPUs this last year, or perhaps we were just a little unlucky in the silicon lottery, but the XLR8 OC just doesn’t seem to live up to its name. As GTX 1080s go, it certainly seemed like a card capable of shaking up the ecosphere. With a smallish form factor, triple-fan dissipation design, one of the lowest prices we’d seen, and an aftermarket PCB, it was set to be a winner from the get-go. Or so it seemed.
Where did it go wrong? Well, perhaps a little too much emphasis was placed on the marketing and naming scheme; perhaps PNY isn’t sufficiently experienced when it comes to developing overclockable PCBs— either way, we struggled to push it very far past its stock clocks. We understand: It’s all about those sales figures. The graphics industry is an aggressive business, the number of manufacturers is dwindling, and as the lines blur between consumer and enterprise products, commercial companies such as PNY are looking to expand into PC gaming as well, to ensure they have income and revenue for the future. It’s admirable, very admirable. However, PNY hasn’t spent the same amount of time or gained the same amount of experience as the other big dogs when it comes to card design, and it shows.
SUCH SADNESS So, what’s so heinous that we’ve had to write two paragraphs condemning the nature of the beast? In short, it all goes back to our reference card. At stock, we could push the Founder’s Edition up by 260MHz on the core clock, and 500MHz on the memory—that’s a sizable portion. Compare that to the XLR8 OC card, and the maximum we could achieve on the core was 50MHz, with 400MHz on the memory, before running into trouble. As such, our Fire Strike score varied by as much as 508 points between the two. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you consider the whole premise that the XLR8 card was designed around, it paints a different story.
That said, the card performs incredibly well at stock. There’s no proprietary software or embedded overclock profiles here, just good old-fashioned GPU boost bringing up the core clock. As standard, you should achieve a final boost just pushing the 2GHz mark. In fact, in most titles, it outstrips the Founder’s Edition by around two to three frames per second on average, and considering the card costs $50 less than its flashier competitor, we can’t help but be impressed. At 1080p, the GTX 1080 is still the monster core that we expect; it pumps out well over 100fps in both FarCryPrimal and The Division, and hits a pleasingly comfortable 60fps-plus in Riseof the TombRaider and TotalWar:Attila, two titles renowned for testing your hardware. At 1440p, you’re still well into the high 70s for most titles. And even single-card 4K is entirely feasible, given enough tweaking to some key settings (antialiasing in particular).
As far as aesthetics go, it harks back to the earlier GTX 500 and 600 series. There’s no RGB lighting, just a simple red LED setup spinning around the three fans. On top of that, you get a clean backplate, with no fancy engraved logos or ventilation holes—just a clean, quiet, cool card. If we have any complaints, the plastic used on the shroud does look a little too shiny, but that’s hardly going to affect performance.
Overclocking prowess aside, the XLR8 is a well-built, well-specced card, for $50 less than the Founder’s Edition. It outperforms some of the more extreme GTX 1080s we’ve seen, and despite its overclocking setbacks, and slightly clusmy name, we believe that if you’re looking to get the best-value GTX 1080 money can buy right now, PNY’s XLR8 OC edition is well worth the investment.