Aorus’ GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Xtreme Edition 11G graphics card reviewed

Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080 Ti sets a new high-water mark for single-card graphics performance, but the company’s Founders Edition cooler might leave some wanting in the noise, vibration, and harshness department. The centrifugal fan on that relatively compact heatsink sounds nice for a blower, and it has the perk of exhausting hot air directly from a case, but the card’s 250W board power means those who want maximum performance and minimum noise won’t find that nirvana from the Founders Edition cooler.

Happily, the Founders Edition isn’t the only way to get a GTX 1080 Ti any longer. Nvidia’s board partners have smoothed off the rough edges of the Founders Edition blower with a dizzying array of custom-cooled takes on the GTX 1080 Ti in the past couple weeks, and the first example of those efforts on our test bench is Gigabyte’s Aorus GTX 1080 Ti Xtreme Edition 11G.

The Gigabyte GTX 1080 Ti Xtreme Gaming marked the introduction of the company’s highest-performance heatsink for an air-cooled graphics card, and the company hasn’t messed around too much with the basic design since. In fact, the chassis of the GTX 1080 Ti Xtreme Edition 11G is basically the same as that of the GTX 1080 Xtreme Edition 8G we looked at recently. That’s a good thing, since that Aorus GTX 1080 is among the finest graphics cards we’ve ever tested. The most noticeable external change is a subtle “GeForce GTX” stamped into the aluminum at the rear of the cooler.

If you’re new to Aorus’ highest-end cooler design, it’s worth revisiting the basics. To start, the company moves air across the heatsink with three 100-mm fans that are cleverly staggered to reduce the graphics card’s overall length. Those relatively large fans don’t have to turn as fast as smaller spinners do, either, meaning potentially lower noise for the same amount of airflow.

That trio of fans moves air over a massive fin stack connected to five copper heat pipes. The cooler makes contact with the GP102 chip itself using a broad copper base plate that also cools the card’s 11GB of GDDR5X RAM. The card’s 12 power phases aren’t cooled by this plate, but they are thermally coupled with the fin stack by several strategically-placed thermal pads. Gigabyte claims the irregular shape of the fins in the stack results in better thermal transfer compared to traditional vertical fins, as well.

Like the GTX 1080 Xtreme Edition before it, this Aorus GTX 1080 Ti boasts a couple sharp-looking RGB LED accents. A prominent Aorus badge on the side of the card lights up in any color one might want, while the company’s eagle logo makes a bedazzling appearance on the back plate. The X-brace on the front of the card lights up in Technicolor, as well. The color and lighting style of those accents can be controlled using Aorus’ Graphics Engine software.

The Xtreme Edition card features a slightly-redesigned version of the copper inlay that’s becoming a hallmark of Aorus’ graphics-card styling. The company has tempered its claims about the cooling performance this copper accent adds this time around, since independent testing of the feature didn’t reveal any substantial difference in cooling performance on the similarly-equipped Aorus GTX 1080. Really, the extra copper just looks cool. Any extra thermal wicking it offers is a bonus.

The Xtreme Edition’s display output block is also slightly different from that of its predecessors’. While Aorus still provides one front-mounted HDMI port for VR breakout boxes, it’s moved the other HDMI port that used to reside up front to the rear port cluster.

With this change, folks have the choice between running monitors from the card’s primary HDMI port and its DVI-D output or from both of its rear HDMI ports. I think that’s probably a better-balanced approach than having two front-panel HDMI ports.

Compared to the reference GTX 1080 Ti, Gigabyte applies a solid factory boost to the Xtreme Edition 11G’s GPU. In its default “gaming mode,” the Aorus card sports a 1607 MHz base speed and a 1721 MHz boost clock. An “OC mode” ups those speeds to 1632 MHz base and 1746 MHz boost. Both of Aorus’ factory clock speed profiles give the Xtreme Edition 11G a nice boost in memory speeds over the Founders Edition card’s 11 GT/s effective rate, as well.

As we’ve learned to expect from any Pascal card, however, these figures are pretty meaningless once Nvidia’s GPU Boost 3.0 frequency-scaling algorithm has its way. It’s far more valuable to concentrate on the delivered clock speeds that Aorus’ massive cooler allows for with GPU Boost. We’ll quantify those in a sec.

The Aorus GTX 1080 Ti Xtreme Edition 11G rings in at $750 compared to the Founders Edition card’s $700 price tag. Aorus offers a total of four years of warranty coverage with registration, or three years without—both figures worthy of a high-end card. Let’s see if the $50 premium over Nvidia’s reference design is worth it now.

Our testing methods
As always, we did our best to deliver clean test numbers. Our test system was configured as follows:

 

Since we don’t have any other custom GeForce GTX 1080 Tis in the lab yet, we’re using Nvidia’s Founders Edition card as our point of reference. Fitting.

Since we’ve already performed extensive “Inside the Second” testing on the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, we won’t be repeating that work here. Instead, we’ll be using the canned benchmarks from Rise of the Tomb Raider and Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor to generate a quick sense of each card’s relative performance in average FPS.

Our testing methods are generally publicly available and reproducible. If you have any questions about our methods or results, be sure to leave a comment on this article or join us in the TR forums.

Out-of-the-box performance

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
To see how Shadow of Mordor performed with the GP102 GPU, we used the game’s Ultra preset at a variety of resolutions. Click through the graphs below to see how the Aorus card stacks up with the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FE at stock speeds.

Thanks to its beefy cooler and factory clock speed boost, the Aorus card takes a small but consistent lead over the Founders Edition GTX 1080 Ti in Shadow of Mordor. Whether for high-refresh-rate gaming at lower resolutions or high-fidelity 4K gaming, the GTX 1080 Ti remains a standout performer in this older title.

Rise of the Tomb Raider
2015’s Rise of the Tomb Raider is still one of the more graphically-demanding titles around, and its built-in benchmark offers a handy way to compare performance among graphics cards in a pinch. We tested the game using the following settings at the same trio of resolutions we used for Shadow of Mordor:

Here’s how the GTX 1080 Tis dealt with it:

No surprises here, either. The Aorus card runs slightly faster overall in this title than the Founders Edition does. We expect as much from factory-boosted cards.

Overclocked performance
Even though GPU Boost 3.0 is pretty good at wringing most of the potential clock speed headroom out of a given Pascal chip, we can still usually find a little extra speed through manual tweaking. To get there, we used the proprietary Graphics Engine utility provided by Aorus for the GTX 1080 Ti XE 11G. To overclock the Founders Edition card, we used MSI’s tried-and-true Afterburner utility.

Before we began our manual overclocking efforts, we ran the Unigine Heaven benchmark for a few minutes to establish a baseline for each card. As we found in our temperature testing, all three of these cards boost well above their specified clocks under load.

One quirk of the Aorus card is that its stock power limit seems to be set rather low. While monitoring the card’s behavior in GPU-Z, I noticed that the Xtreme Edition would occasionally bump against its power limit and clock down a bit before resuming regular operation. This sort of rev-limiter bouncing wasn’t something I expected to see given the card’s twin eight-pin PCIe inputs and many-phase power-delivery system. Raising the card’s power limit in Aorus’ Graphics Engine software made this issue go away entirely.

Although raising the power limit alone is technically overclocking, it does suggest that there was a happy medium somewhere between the tune that Aorus’ engineers chose and the full range available in the Graphics Engine software. Owners of this card might want to bump the limit up a few percent for more consistent performance.

The “GPU clock offset” figure in the table above isn’t a real-world clock—it’s just the amount we moved the slider in MSI Afterburner or the Aorus Graphics Engine.

To find our final stable clock speeds, we maxed out the cards’ power limits in our tweaking utilities before gradually increasing clock speeds and memory speeds. We ran the Unigine Heaven benchmark after each increase to determine stability, and then ran Doom at 4K with Ultra and Nightmare settings to further establish stability and stress each card’s memory subsystem. Both cards ended up relatively close to one another in final clocks, but the Aorus card’s cooler is much more effective.

Thanks to a fortunate testing goof, I can include a result for the Aorus GTX 1080 Ti with a GPU core clock increase alone, and one with both its core and memory overclocked. That goof lets us get some insight into how overclocking the core clock alone and the core clock plus the memory clock affects performance.

In Shadow of Mordor, goosing the core clock alone doesn’t help the Aorus GTX 1080 Ti too much compared to its gaming mode profile. Push the memory to 12.1 GT/s, and both the Founders Edition and this Aorus card get relatively large performance increases. From these results, we can conclude it’s critical to overclock the GTX 1080 Ti’s memory for the best performance. With a fully-armed-and-operational memory overclock, the Aorus card can produce about 4.8% more frames per second on average than it can at stock speeds. The GTX 1080 Ti FE isn’t far behind in performance, though.

Rise of the Tomb Raider seems to care little about core or memory clock speed increases, so the performance benefits from our overclock are more muted in this title. Still, if you’re willing to pay the price of extra waste heat and power consumption, the Aorus card delivers slightly higher performance than the Founders Edition when we turn the screws. Let’s see just how these cards handle noise levels and cooling now.

Noise levels
To quantify the noise these graphics cards produce, we used the Faber Acoustical SoundMeter application running on an iPhone 6S Plus. The meter was placed 18″ from each graphics card while they were running the Unigine Heaven benchmark.

Since the Aorus card can stop its fans at idle, its noise levels are equal to those of the noise floor in our testing environment. The GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition spins its fan at all times, so it makes a slightly discernable sound even with no load. Idle noise levels don’t change whether these cards are overclocked or left at stock clocks, either.

Flip over to load noise levels, however, and the Aorus card sets itself apart in both stock and overclocked configurations. Left at factory clocks in gaming mode, the Aorus cooler runs more than seven dBA quieter than the Founders Edition card does—an impressive drop. Overclocked, the Aorus card still runs slightly quieter than Nvidia’s reference design does at stock clocks. That’s great performance, and it’s what I’ve come to expect from Gigabyte’s top-end coolers. Nvidia’s Founders Edition cooler flirts with 50 dBA after the chip underneath is overclocked

Measured noise levels alone aren’t the whole story with custom-cooled graphics cards, of course. The Aorus card is the third to cross my test bench with Gigabyte’s 100-mm fan setup, and its spinners still sound great. Even under an overclocked load, the Aorus GTX 1080 Ti’s primary noise character sounds like gently moving air. I suspect that part of the card’s higher-than-expected noise levels come from the moderate coil whine it produces under load. This card’s coil whine isn’t the worst I’ve ever heard, but it can overshadow whatever gentle whoosh the fans make when they’re running.

Nvidia’s Founders Edition cooler can’t hope to match the Aorus card’s enormous heatsink for noise performance, and it doesn’t. Even though its blower sounds quite good for this type of heatsink, the card still has a distinct growly character at idle, and it produces a rather high-pitched whine under load. The more piercing character of this sound is harder to ignore than that of the Aorus card’s lower-pitched whoosh.

For fun, I also manually pushed each cooler’s fans to 100% for noise-insensitive folks who are looking to get the most out of overclocking and GPU Boost 3.0. Even under those extreme conditions, the Aorus cooler didn’t crest 52 dBA, and it still sounded quite pleasant at speed despite being noticeable in our testing environment.

The Founders Edition card produced a hair-dryer-like 62 dBA under the same conditions. To its credit, Nvidia’s cooler sounds like nothing more than a hiss when it’s maxed out, but it’s way too loud and high-pitched a hiss to ignore. Folks in shared spaces or without closed headphones will want to steer clear of maxing out the Founders Edition’s fan speed.

GPU temperatures
As we’ve come to expect after working with Pascal cards for a while, Nvidia’s GPU Boost 3.0 makes the clock speeds marked on graphics card boxes more or less irrelevant to the delivered clocks one will get once a card is up and running. GPU core temperature is one of the major determinants of how GPU Boost 3.0 works, so we recorded temps while each card ran the Unigine Heaven demo.

At stock clocks, the Aorus cooler shaves a whopping 12° C off the Founders Edition card’s result. At those temperatures, the card hung out around 1847 MHz to 1860 MHz in its “gaming mode,” about 100 MHz higher than the reference card managed when I reviewed it. Flipping on the card’s “OC mode” boosted clocks a bit further, to a range of about 1860 MHz to 1873 MHz in practice. In either case, the card is delivering over 100 MHz more than Gigabyte’s specified clock speeds.

Power consumption
To get a rough idea of the power draw of the Aorus Xtreme Edition, we hooked up our testbed to our trusty Watts Up power meter and fired up Doom‘s Foundry level.

Under our test load, the Aorus GTX 1080 Ti only needs 10 more watts or so to deliver its superior performance. Once we start turning up the clocks, however, the tables turn. The GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition consumes about 30 fewer watts when it’s pushed to the sky, but that may be because of a power limit we discovered when both the core and memory are OCed. The Aorus card can sustain both core and memory overclocks without issue, so its higher power consumption comes with higher performance at all times. Whether you’re running stock speeds or overclocking, however, a beefy power supply with a GTX 1080 Ti is a must.

Conclusions
The GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition is an amazing graphics card, so I’ve been excited to see what Nvidia’s board partners would put up against the Founders Edition heatsink. Aorus’ GTX 1080 Ti Xtreme Edition 11G is the first custom-cooled GTX 1080 Ti in the TR labs, and it’s a good one. Aorus’ combination of memory and core clock boosts give this card a nice performance boost over the reference GTX 1080 Ti, and its cooler is much quieter and more effective than Nvidia’s Founders Edition heatsink.

Its many virtues aside, I do have to wonder why Aorus’ engineers set the Xtreme Edition’s power limit so conservatively. The card often hit that limit in our stock-clocked testing, and its clock-speed consistency suffered a bit for it. After I maxed the power limit in the Aorus Graphics Engine, the card boosted much higher and with better clock-speed consistency than its stock parameters allowed for.

While raising the power limit is technically overclocking, the card certainly has the PCIe power inputs and power-delivery subsystem to handle the added juice, and there would seem to be a happy medium somewhere Aorus’ factory setting and the maximum power limit. Aorus might have been more worried about noise, heat, and power consumption over absolute performance when it developed the card’s factory tune. Still, I don’t think a card with such a beefy cooler and PCB should be hitting power limits at all out of the box.

In every other part of our testing gauntlet, the XE 11G passed with flying colors. Aorus’ triple-fan cooler is still one of the quietest and best-sounding I’ve ever tested. The company’s upgraded power-delivery circuitry let me overclock both the GPU and memory on our particular card without running into power limits as I did on the GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition. It’s quieter and better-sounding than the FE card with the screws turned, too. With that tweaking, the Xtreme Edition 11G may be the single best-performing graphics card that’s ever passed through the TR labs.

The Xtreme Editon 11G’s $750 price tag puts it in the middle of the pack for a custom GTX 1080 Ti at the moment. I think that’s a fair price to pay for a card that offers quieter running and better performance—both stock and overclocked—than the GTX 1080 Ti FE. If your case has the space for it, the GTX 1080 Ti Xtreme Edition 11G is a TR Editor’s Choice.