Aorus GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Review

Aorus, for those that don't know, is Gigabyte's brand for premium and flagship products spanning graphics cards, motherboards, and peripherals. This product, then, is one of the highest end GTX 1080 Ti SKUs the company offers (the Xtreme Edition of this card being the absolute top dog). It doesn't have a crazy or overly long name like many such cards, but the design itself is far from subtle. Requiring three expansion slots and spanning 293mm long and 142mm tall, the Aorus GTX 1080 Ti is a real monster. Via advanced custom cooling and a solid overclock, Aorus is clearly looking to impress, as well it should given that it's also asking you for £760 in exchange for the card. 




We're personally not massive fans of the design here, finding it a little too garish and in-your-face, but this isn't something we'll knock points off for, as it's entirely subjective. The main thing to be aware of is just how much space you'll need to accommodate it – it certainly isn't going to be your best bet for an SLI setup, though this is of course supported.

Where Aorus gains points is in build quality. Unlike most of its rivals, metal is used for most of the cooler shroud, although the cross covering the middle of the front fascia is hewn from plastic. You can flex and move the shroud a little if you try, but overall it's solid thanks in large part to the thick metal backplate affixed to the PCB – an absolute necessity when you're strapping a cooler this big to a card.The default base clock of this card is 1,569MHz with a rated boost clock of 1,683MHz. However, like many third-party Nvidia offerings, a free but slight performance boost is available out of the box by selecting OC Mode in an appropriate overclocking utility like Aorus Engine. This ups both speeds by 25MHz, and this is also the mode we've tested in. There's also a Silent Mode available, which drops the base and boost clocks to 1,480MHz and 1,594MHz respectively (reference speeds) while also altering the fan curve to favour lower noise. Going by the OC Mode base clock, the Aorus GTX 1080 Ti is clocked nearly 8 percent higher than a Founders Edition card. That said, there is no memory overclock – Aorus has it running here at the default 11Gbps.