Dream in innocent white: KFA2 / Galax GTX 1080 Ti Hall Of Fame (HOF) in review

1 - Vorstellung und Testsetup 2 - Platine und Kühler im Detail 3 - Gaming-Performance WQHD 4 - Gaming-Performance UHD 5 - Leistungsaufnahme im Detail: 6 - Taktraten, Kühlung und Geräuschentwicklung 7 - Zusammenfassung und Fazit

So the appearance of the KFA2 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti HOF (Hall Of Fame) really has nothing to do with kleckern. There is already a really good knock ingonated in the packaging. Speaking of which, a block is also the card itself, because it is not only large, but also really heavy. If so, because already.

Since the actual performance of all board partner cards depends more on the actual boost clock achieved, and thus causally depends on the cooling, the power target and above all the quality of the respective chip, any test based only on benchmark bars is more of a Random snapshot of a single specimen. This is precisely why we have focused on the actual technical implementation of each model and have been able to document this very well with our equipment.

Unboxing, dimensions and connections

The map is powerful, visual. as well as haptically conspicuous and thus truly nothing for discouraged little spirits. Galax / KFA2 packs this monster into a handsome folding box and thus also upgrades the unboxing process neatly. But it will be up to us later to test the inner values in more detail.

There are plenty of accessories, although the three Molex to 8-pin adapters would probably have been better for safety reasons. At the latest with AWG20 cables of simple power supplies, fire danger is called for here, especially since the sufficient presence of the PCIe connections corresponds quite well with the real power output of most current power supplies. What is missing here cannot be conjured up.

A nice gag is the so-called LuminHold, a Plexiglas construction with RGB illumination, which can also be screwed on via the expansion slots and connected to the graphics card for direct control. However, the required software must be downloaded and installed separately, because only the manuals in PDF format and Nvidia's GeForce Experience are located on the enclosed USB stick. After all, the annoying DVD has finally been saved.

With an extreme weight of 1.689 kilos, an above-average 31.8 cm real installation length (outer edge slot aperture to the end of the cover), an extreme height of 14.5 cm (upper edge motherboard slot to top edge cover) and a mounting depth of a massive 5.4 cm, this 2.5 cm is slot card is the most powerful card tested so far in the field. It is also important to note that on the back side there will be a further approx. 0.5 cm of space are required, which should be taken into account in large tower coolers.

The material mix of plastic for the cover is a matter of taste, but at least pure white is still quite rare on the market. The design line of the entire HOF cards is consistently followed up and you will not find any real optical surprises besides the really expansive dimensions. Whether one of the plastic baroques will like it at the end, everyone has to make up for themselves.

The backplate is made of brushed aluminium, which is coated in black on the inside and is also passively used for cooling. The top is dominated by a backlit LCD display and the three (!) white 8-pin power supply connectors. These sit 180° rotated at the end of the board of the top.

The rather coarsely dissolving, backlit B/W display is intended for displaying a logo or after installing the appropriate software also for the output of clock, fan and voltages and much more. The optical gain in no worse, as long as a side window is present in the housing and the card has not been installed vertically by riser cable.

The bottom and top show the vertical slat orientation of the cooler and the absence of a VRM heat sink that could actively cool other assemblies. Instead, as usual, one relies on an assembly frame between the radiator and the board, which should have a stabilizing and cooling function, but has not been implemented quite consistently. But more on that later.

The end of the map shows four 8 mm heatpipes for the right part of the radiator structure. However, from this side the fifth, a bent 6 mm heatpipe, is not visible from the outside. But more on that later. When it comes to connectivity, you're more likely to rely on standard costs from an HDMI 2.0 port, as well as three DisplayPort 1.4 jacks and a revived dual-link DVI-D connector (pictured right). Nvidia had already saved it as a precautionary measure when it came to reference design.

Specifications

The GPU-Z screenshot shows us the most important key data in advance, whereby the actual boost achieved with our model was significantly higher:

Finally, the whole thing again as a tabular comparison to the other relevant graphics card models:

Test system and measurement methods

The new test system and the methodology have already been described in great detail in the basic article "How We Test Graphics Cards" (English: "How We Test Graphics Cards") and therefore, for the sake of simplicity, we now only refer to this detailed Description. So if you want to read everything again, you are welcome to do so. However, we have improved CPU and cooling once again in order to largely exclude possible CPU bottle necks for this fast card.

If you are interested, the summary in table form quickly provides a brief overview: