One interesting development from Gigabyte at this year’s CES was the expansion of its Aorus branding and the transition from Xtreme Gaming. Initially used on its RGB LED equipped motherboards, the company is rolling out the brand to its other higher end products including laptops and graphics cards. While it appears that Xtreme Gaming is not going away entirely, Aorus is taking the spotlight with the introduction of the first Aorus branded graphics card: the GTX 1080.
Paul's Hardware got hands on with the new card (video) at the Gigabyte CES booth.
Featuring a similar triple 100mm fan cooler as the GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming 8G, the Aorus GTX 1080 comes with x patterned LED lighting as well as a backlit Aorus logo on the side and a backlit Eagle on the backplate. The cooler is comprised of three 100mm double stacked fans (the center fan is recessed and spins in the opposite direction of the side fans) over a shrouded angled aluminum fin stack that connects to the GPU over five large copper heatpipes.
The graphics card is powered by two 8-pin PCI-E power connectors.
In an interesting twist, the card has two HDMI ports on the back of the card that are intended to be used to hook up front panel HDMI outputs for things like VR headsets. Another differentiator between the upcoming card and the Xtreme Gaming 8G is the backplate which has a large copper plate secured over the underside of the GPU. Several sites are reporting that this area can be used for watercooling, but I am skeptical of this as if you are going to go out and buy a waterblock for your graphics card you might as well buy a block to put on top of the GPU and not on the area of the PCB opposite the GPU!). As is, the copper plate on the backplate certainly won’t hurt cooling, and it looks cool, but that’s all I suspect it is.
Think Computers also checked out the Aorus graphics card. (video above)
Naturally, Gigabyte is not talking clock speeds on this new card, but I expect it to hit at least the same clocks as its Xtreme Gaming 8G predecessor which was clocked at 1759 MHz base and 1848 MHz boost out of the box and 1784 MHz base and 1936 MHz boost in OC Mode respectively. Gigabyte also overlocked the memory on that card up to 10400 MHz on OC Mode.
Gigabyte also had new SLI HB bridges on display bearing the Aorus logo to match the Aorus GPU. The company also had Xtreme Gaming SLI HB bridges though which further suggests that they are not completely retiring that branding (at least not yet).
Pricing has not been announced, but the card will be available in February.
Gigabyte has yet to release official photos of the card or a product page, but it should show up on their website shortly. In the meantime, Paul's Hardware and Think Computers shot some video of the card on the show floor which I have linked above if you are interested in the card. Looking on Amazon, the Xtreme Gaming 1080 8GB is approximately $690 before rebate so I would guess that the Aorus card would come out at a slight premium over that if only for the fact that it is a newer release, has a more expensive backplate and additional RGB LED backlighting.
What are your thoughts on the move to everything-Aorus?
PC Perspective's CES 2017 coverage is sponsored by NVIDIA.
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RGB! Awesome. But why orange?
RGB! Awesome. But why orange? Couldn’t they have gone with blue. The market needs blue cards. Logo looks alright. Just alright. I do like the build of this better than the windforce cards. The windforce cards always looked cheaply made to me.
Yeah I have an old GTX 650 ti
Yeah I have an old GTX 650 ti Windforce and it looks like the same fan tech as a new card. Cheap plastic fan guard and thin fans.
it’s another 1080, meh.
it’s another 1080, meh.
With same limits as every
With same limits as every other one.
It gwan to cost me whole crop
It gwan to cost me whole crop of budz fer dis here 1080! JHH’s da ziggurat man at de tops o dem high price levels!
I would love to see the focus
I would love to see the focus groups and user surveys Gigabyte used to determine that do you even lift bro eaglechicken should be the face of their gaming/enthusiast brand.
After reading this and seeing
After reading this and seeing some CES coverage by some other YT’s, some appear to be saying that the new Aorus is not actually a GTX 1080, but actually an “un-announced” upcoming NVidia GPU that will get released this spring.
Hardware Canucks talks about it towards the end of this video, at about 3:30:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MAqmXYhECM&t=0s
So which is it, is it really a 1080, or were you guys talking about different cards than hardware canucks?
If there is eventually a 1080
If there is eventually a 1080 Ti or whatever is above 1080 but below titan xp, I'm sure it will have a similar Aorus cooler and design as the card at CES. I am skeptical that the card at CES would be the actual 1080 Ti chip in it though :). It seemed most of the news sites and youtubers were saying it was a 1080. I don't know that we 100% know either way. 1080 Ti is probably still a ways off though, probably not until GTC if we are lucky (and maybe not even then, or it will be a paper launch / initial reveal).. Just my opinion though. Note that I don't have any inside info on this, and I haven't been following the 1080 Ti rumors that closely either so you may know more about that than I do! 🙂
I’ve got the Gigabyte GTX
I’ve got the Gigabyte GTX 1080 Waterforce GPU running 4 monitors and flight sim hardware super heavy duty cards I recommend
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK3nUmy3J8g