Reason Pack: KFA2 / Galax GTX 1080 Ti EXOC in review

In contrast to the ex-factory very high overclocked EVGA GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Gaming, KFA2 / Galax is a deliberate use of reason and mediocrity, so that two fans on this rather slim dual slot card should be enough. In general, the... The board is a good old acquaintance and comes directly from Nvidia. This in turn confirms that it is simply an unchanged reference design. This certainly has upfront and night parts, but saves costs first. We're going to be no... Cooling concept and implementation The back of the board is conspicuously inconspicuous and shows the dark traces of the glued-on thermal pads between the backplate and the board. Which would have made us look elegant at the cooling. Tue... Benchmarks in 2560 x 1440 pixels We have deliberately dispensed with Full HD (1920 x 1080p) as the KFA2 / Galax GTX 1080 Ti EXOC runs into the CPU limit even in the highest settings. In WQHD (2560 x 1440 pixels), on the other hand, the actual work begins... Benchmarks in 3840 x 2160 pixels The KFA2 / Galax GTX 1080 Ti EXOC is in this high resolution, depending on the game, between 2 and approx. 4 percent faster than a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition or TitanX (Pascal). Overall, many titles ... When it is up to the power supply, we first need to know that the card with the factory settings with the 250 watts of the reference card has been set a very restrained Power Target, but this could be manually raised to just under 300 watts,... In fact achievable clock rates The actual achievable clock is subject to some influences. Even if GPU quality plays a bigger role here - unfortunately it cannot be influenced as the only element. And so it is in the end well möglic... Fan control and curves The difference in gaming in open and closed construction is clearly visible, which should of course also be measurable and audible. The start-up impulses are somewhat uncoordinated and you miss a little clearer... Summary There must be absolutely no shortcoming if a graphics card is not one of the fastest within its product category of factory overclocked cards with the same graphics chip. For the Founders Edition it still has...

In contrast to the ex-factory very high overclocked EVGA GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Gaming, KFA2 / Galax is a deliberate use of reason and mediocrity, so that two fans on this rather slim dual slot card should be enough. In general, despite the expensive high-end GPU, this model is rather designed for pure understatement, which also has a certain charm.

This map is more based on the specifications of the standard or Reference model ("Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB in test") and tries to make at least the cooling a little quieter and more efficient. We will see later that you can achieve certain performance advantages compared to the reference model by using slightly lower temperaurs alone.

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 KFA2 / Galax GTX 1080 Ti EXOC is almost a lightweight in the circle of the other GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. At 976 grams, you undercut the heaviest card by almost 500 grams, which is already a certain house number and certainly also accommodates the motherboard.

With 27.8 cm real installation length (outer edge slot aperture until the end of the cover), a height of rather modest 11.5 cm (upper edge motherboard slot to top edge cover) and a mounting depth of 3.5 cm, the dual slot card is rather an average large card, which is back then again approx. 0.5 cm of space is required, which should be taken into account in large tower coolers.

If the upper cover made of light metal had not been provided with optical firlefanz at the end of the card, the length would even be added to approx. 27 cm shrink. Despite these small design slips, the matt black lacquered cover is rather inconspicuous, but feels cool and valuable. The two-colour painted backplate is already visually much more pleasing

The top is characterized by the LED backlit "Geforce GTX" lettering. The two power supply connections (8-pin and 6-pin) sit unturned at the end of the board of the top.

The bottom and top show the vertical slat orientation of the cooler and the presence of a real VRM heat sink that actively cools other assemblies. Both the top and bottom show the bent cover, which tends to direct the hot exhaust air towards the back of the card, thus reducing a possible re-sucking.

The end of the map shows the four 8 mm heatpipes for the right part of the radiator structure. However, from this side the fifth, a 6 mm heatpipe, is not visible from the outside. But more on that later. As with the reference design, the variety of connections is based on standard costs from an HDMI 2.0 port, as well as three DisplayPort 1.4 jacks. The old-fashioned dual-link DVI-D connector had already been saved by Nvidia in the reference design as a precautionary measure. Since the reference board is also used in this card, this similarity is not coincidental.

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:

	Nvidia Titan X – (Pascal) Mr President, I would like to	Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 Ti FE	Galax GTX 1080 Ti EXOC	Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 FE	Nvidia Geforce GTX 980 Ti
Gpu	GP102	GP102	GP102	GP104	GM200
CUDA cores	3584	3584	3584	2560	2816
Base clock	1417 MHz	1480 MHz	1531 MHz	1607 MHz	1000 MHz
Boost clock	1531 MHz+	1582 MHz+	1645 MHz	1733 MHz+	1076 MHz+
Memory Size & Type	12 GByte GDDR5X	11 GByte GDDR5X	11 GByte GDDR5X	8 GByte GDDR5X	6 GByte GDDR5
The size	471 mm2	471 mm2	471 mm2	314 mm2	601 mm2
Technology	16 nm	16 nm	16 nm	16 nm	28 nm
Transistors	12 billion	12 billion	12 billion	7.2 billion	8 billion
Streaming Multiprocessors (SM)	28	28	28	20	22
GFLOPS (basic clock)	10.157	10.609	10975	8.228	5.632
Texture Units	224	224	224	160	176
Texture fill rate	317.4 GT/s	331.5 GT/s	342.9 GT/s	257.1 GT/s	214 GT/s
Rops	96	88	88	64	96
Pixel fill rate	136 GPix/s	130.24 GPix/s	134.7 GPix/s	114.2 GPix/s	116.7 GPix/s
Storage data rate	10 Gbps	11 Gbps	11 Gbps	10 Gbps	7 Gbps
Storage bus	384 bits	352 bits	352 bits	256 bits	384 bits
Memory bandwidth	480 GByte/s	484 GByte/s	484.4 GByte/s	320 GByte/s	336 GByte/s
L2 cache	3 MByte	2816 KByte	2816 KByte	2 MByte	3 MByte
Tdp	250 watts	250 watts	250 Watt (PT)	180 watts	250 watts

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:

Test systems and measuring rooms
Hardware:	Intel Core i7-6900K -4.3GHz MSI X99S XPower Gaming Titanium Corsair Vengeance DDR4-3200 1x 1 TByte Toshiba OCZ RD400 (M.2, System SSD) 2x 960 GByte Toshiba OCZ TR150 (Storage, Images) Be Quiet Dark Power Pro 11, 850-watt power supply Windows 10 Pro (all updates)
Cooling:	Alphacool Ice Block XPX Alphacool Ice Age 2000 Chiller 2x Be Quiet! Silent Wings 3 PWM (Closed Case Simulation) Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut (for cooler change)
Housing:	Lian Li PC-T70 with expansion kit and modifications Modes: Open Benchtable, Closed Case
Power consumption:	non-contact DC measurement on the PCIe slot (Riser-Card) non-contact DC measurement on the external PCIe power supply Direct voltage measurement on the respective feeders and on the power supply 2x Rohde & Schwarz HMO 3054, 500 MHz multi-channel oscillograph with memory function 4x Rohde & Schwarz HZO50, current togor adapter (1 mA to 30 A, 100 KHz, DC) 4x Rohde & Schwarz HZ355, touch divider (10:1, 500 MHz) 1x Rohde & Schwarz HMC 8012, digital multimeter with storage function
Thermography:	Optris PI640, infrared camera PI Connect evaluation software with profiles
Acoustics:	NTI Audio M2211 (with calibration file) Steinberg UR12 (with phantom power for the microphones) Creative X7, Smaart v.7 own low-reflection measuring room, 3.5 x 1.8 x 2.2 m (LxTxH) Axial measurements, perpendicular to the center of the sound source(s), measuring distance 50 cm Noise in dBA (Slow) as RTA measurement Frequency spectrum as a graph