The Card

At first glance the card seems almost identical to the Gigabyte GTX 1080 Extreme Edition, but when you take a look at the back, you'll see the copper backplate which is integrated with the metal backplate. Dimensions of the card are 29.0 cm x 14.5 cm.


You will find adjustable RGB lighting on the Gigabyte GTX 1080 AORUS Xtreme.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include a DVI port, an HDMI port, and three DisplayPorts. On the back of the card are another two HDMI ports. Since the NVIDIA GPU does not support as many active outputs at the same time, Gigabyte added extra circuitry to the board to detect your output configuration. Detection requires a reboot, so when running in VR mode with 3x HDMI and 3x DP ports enabled, connecting a DVI monitor does nothing until you reboot. The card will detect the outputs and switch to the non-VR configuration of 1x DVI, 1x HDMI and 3x DP once the reboot has taken place. Unlike previous NVIDIA cards, the DVI port no longer includes an analog signal, so you'll have to use an active adapter. NVIDIA also updated DisplayPort to be 1.2 certified and 1.3/1.4 ready, which enables support for 4K @ 120 Hz and 5K @ 60 Hz or 8K @ 60 Hz with two cables.

The GPU also comes with an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 2.0b compatible, which supports HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies. The GPU video encoding unit has been updated to support HEVC at 10-bit and 12-bit.


NVIDIA made some changes to SLI with Pascal. Two-way SLI is now the only officially supported configuration for gaming. Three-way or Quad SLI can no longer be enabled in games; however, both do work in a few benchmarks. Also, for 4K at 60 Hz and above, NVIDIA recommends a new high-bandwidth SLI bridge called "SLI HB," which occupies both SLI fingers. The old bridges will work fine at lower resolutions.


Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back).