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What are the best GTX 1080 cards for a small chassis?

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Jan 29, 2017

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Here’s the Deal

3 Options Considered

Best GTX 1080 cards for a small chassis	Price	3DMark Score (Firestrike)	FPS Fallout 4 (1920x1080)
-- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080	$699	19370	134avg
-- EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW GAMING ACX 3.0	$679.99	17979	108min, 134avg
-- Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 G1 Gaming	$599	17783	107min, 133avg

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080

Top Pro

Very power efficient

While performance is higher than its competitors, the GTX 1080 FE actually uses less power. The maximum amount of power consumption this GPU requires is around 185 watts, which is an improvement of over 35% compared to NVIDIA's previous generation high-end graphical card, the GTX 980 Ti. This also plays a positive roll when choosing a power supply, or determining if you need to upgrade your existing PSU. See More

Top Con

No native support for 3- and 4-way SLI

SLI - short for Scalable Link Interface - is NVIDIA's technology of combining the power of two or more identical GPU's in order to reach a better performance. In other words, you can use multiple GTX 1080 videocards to further increase performance. Although the GTX 1080 supports 2-way SLI without a problem, NVIDIA does not offer support for 3- and 4-way SLI. The included SLI-bridge which serves as a connector between the two cards, is only compatible in a 2-way configuration. 3-way and 4-way SLI are possible, but aren't supported. You'll have to use an older SLI-bridge found on older GeForce models and you'll need to generate an 'Enthusiast Key' on NVIDIA's website. However, NVIDIA does not guarantee a 3- or 4-way configuration will provide any noticeable benefits. See More

Specs

3DMark Score (Firestrike):19370

FPS Fallout 4 (1920x1080):134avg

FPS Total War: Warhammer (2560x1440):80avg

FPS Hitman (1920x1080):107avg

Top Pro

Well optimized

NVIDIA properly optimized the GTX 1080 FE for DirectX. This means that games supporting DirectX 11 will see a slight performance boost, but more-so for the upcoming games using DirectX12. See More

Top Con

Disappointing performance improvements when using Vulkan

Vulkan is a graphical API that allows developers to communicate better with the GPU, which in theory should result to performance improvements compared to the more standard DirectX 12 or OpenGL API's. The GTX 1080 doesn't perform particularly better in Vulkan however, and the difference with the standard OpenGL is minimal at higher resolutions. Doom is one of the first (and only) titles with support for Vulkan and serves as a good benchmark for OpenGL vs Vulkan performance. In 1080p Full HD resolution and Ultra settings, the GTX 1080 is able to reach an average framerate of 140 FPS in OpenGL. Vulkan improves the framerate to 166 FPS, a fifteen percent increase. Starting from 1440p resolutions however, performance improvements using Vulkan are very minimal and not noticeable during gameplay. The 1080 does pretty well at 109 FPS in 1440p, while Vulkan only marginally improves this result with 145 FPS, a 5% increase. For comparison: AMD's RX 480 card does perform significantly better with Vulkan and higher framerates, with a performance boost of 29.3%. Similar results are seen when testing in 4K. In this case, the GTX 1080 using Vulkan actually performs worse than the standard OpenGL, with 59 FPS and 60 FPS respectively. AMD's RX 480 is better optimized, as it's able to achieve a performance increase of 24.7% in this scenario. In short, Vulkan performance seems particularly useful when gaming in Full HD, but it doesn't provide much performance benefits otherwise. It would appear that NVIDIA's Pascal architecture isn't optimized for high-resolution Vulkan gaming. See More

Top Pro

Epic 4K performance

In benchmarks, the GTX 1080 FE (Founder's Edition) is a hair slower than two GTX 980 units in SLI configuration (the difference is 2% in 3DMark 11). In gaming tests, the GTX 1080 FE achieved 61fps average in Need For Speed 2016 on high settings at 4K resolution. For comparison, the AMD Radeon R9 Fury scored 40fps (34% lower), and the GTX 980 scored 34fps (44% lower than the GTX 1080 FE). The only slowdowns you will encounter in maxed out 4K graphics is during extremely demanding scenes. The GTX 1080 FE also supports GPU Boost 3.0 which lets it ramp up performance even higher as long as the temperature doesn't rise too much. See More

EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW GAMING ACX 3.0

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Top Pro

Good value for money

At $649, it's on the cheaper side as far as 1080 graphics cards go. While not really excelling at anything, it has no serious drawbacks either. Making it a good card for people who want a compromise between price and performance. See More

Specs

3DMark Score (Firestrike):17979

FPS Total War: Warhammer (2560x1440):85min, 90avg

FPS Fallout 4 (1920x1080):108min, 134avg

Top Pro

Lots of headroom to overclock and tweak

The FTW ACX 3.0 leaves a lot of room for tweaking. You can overclock for up to +147MHz Core and +176MHz Memory before starting to lose on either core or memory speed. See More

Top Pro

Compact

With a length of 267mm and height of 128mm, the GTX 1080 FTW is one of the most compact 1080 cards available. See More

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