ASUS RoG STRIX GTX 1080 Ti 11GB Graphics Card Review

ASUS are one of the biggest and most popular brands in the world when it comes to high-end gaming hardware, and their RoG product ranges have won many awards for being some of the best on the market. With that in mind, I'm very excited today to be testing their latest RoG STRIX GeForce GTX 1080 Ti OC Edition Graphics Card. It comes with powerful factory overclocks, a massive cooler, and promises to deliver blazing fast performance vs the standard GTX 1080 Ti. Equipped with performance and build quality improvements to almost every component, the RoG STRIX looks set to score some great results today. Featuring Super Alloy Power II, a full-cover heat sink with 40% more surface area than before, 3 x fans with 0dB mode, and an 8+8-pin power connection, it's easy to see why this is their OC Edition; it's packing some serious hardware. Of course, you'll find other features to enjoy, such as the one-click overclocking, RGB lighting system, VR-friendly HDMI ports, and much more! Out of the box, you'll find the card still comes with the usual 11GB of GDDR5X memory and 3584 CUDA cores, all as you would find on the stock Nvidia card. Of course, that improved power delivery system and cooler help the card reach an impressive Boost Clock of 1683 Mhz in Gaming Mode, and 1708 MHz in OC Mode. If that wasn't enough, the Gaming Mode delivers a blazing fast 11010 MHz Memory Clock, while OC Mode takes that up to an even more impressive 11100 MHz. You can choose the Gaming and OC mode with one click in the software, but expect the more extreme OC Mode to mean more heat and more noise, while Gaming Mode, should be a perfect balance between high overclocks, temperatures and heat. Packaging and Accessories The box is huge and also one of the heaviest GPU boxes I've ever handled. It features a few details on the front, but around the back, you'll find a nice breakdown of all the major features. In the box, you'll find a PCI power adapter cable, owners manual/drivers, as well as some handy velcro cable straps. A Closer Look The first thing you notice when handling this card is that it is freaking heavy. That's hardly surprising though when you look at the size of it, as it's relatively long and wide, and aside from the three large fans on the top, the bulk of it is made up from the almost industrial sized heatsink that spans the full size of the card. Massive size aside, it's also a fantastic looking bit of it, with a uniquely shaped shroud that comes finished in matte black, making it easy to match up with any colour scheme. Of course, there's RGB lighting built-in, but we'll see that in action in a moment. Around the back, you'll find 2 x HDMI, 2 x DP, and 1 x DVI, so multiple displays will no be a problem here. Tucked under the card, you'll find two 4-pin PWM fan connectors, allowing you to hook up your system fans to be controlled by the graphics card. This means that card can pull in more airflow when it needs it, rather than just trying to spin its own fans faster to get the job done; very clever! The ASUS STRIX is an overclocked high-end version of the 1080 Ti, which is basically a beastly version of the GTX 1080. The increased performance is met with an increased thirst for power, which you'll need to provide via 2 x 8-pin PCI connectors. Around the back of the card, a large and rather thick back plate provides added strength to the card, and it'll need it too, as a card this heavy would certainly droop without one. In the test bench, the cards RGB lighting sparks to into life. You can customise it in the downloadable software, but by default, it'll cycle through a wide range of RGB colours. Testing & Methodology Please note that on 16/04/2017, the graphics cards featured in this review were completely retested. This was done to implement new changes in the way we test, the settings we use, the software and more. We've also made some slight hardware changes to our test benches, and all games have been recently updated, as has the OS, graphics drivers, etc. This would mean new results would not be a fair comparison to old. For your reference, the last review to feature our old results can't be found here. Here is the test system used for all graphics card reviews (pictured above) and game performance analysis: Graphics Card Test System Motherboard – Asus Rampage V Extreme X99 Processor – Intel Core i7 5960X at stock with turbo enabled RAM – Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) 2666 MHz Graphics Card – Varies per review CPU Cooler – Noctua NH-D15S Power Supply – Be Quiet Power Zone 1000W Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Open Air Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 64-bit Additional Hardware "Killawatt” style electricity usage meter wall plug Precision Gold N05CC Decibel meter Games Throughout the testing procedure, we always use demanding presets which stress graphics cards to reasonable limits. However, in the interest of fairness, any technology which favours either AMD or NVIDIA is disabled. More specifically, this refers to PhysX, Hairworks and similar technologies. Additionally, we also disable all forms of AA, including FXAA, to gauge performance levels which aren't impacted by sophisticated AA. Theoretically, we could have employed FXAA because it only has a minor impact on the frame-rate, but many users strongly dislike the hazy image this causes. N-Sync is always disabled in our testing, graphics card power usage is set to optimised or balance, system power mode is set to High Performance. Some benchmarks may feature more cards, this is due to some tests being older or newer than others, and being used in other game specific feature tests we have conducted, so you'll find all relevant cards included in each chart as we add or remove new and old tests. Selecting strenuous presets especially at higher resolutions can cause hitching and other performance problems on graphics cards with lower amounts of video memory. For example, Rise of the Tomb Raider's Very High textures requires 4GB of RAM to maintain a smooth frame-rate. In theory, we could run the benchmarks at the High setting, but this defeats the purpose of high-end graphics cards which are designed to cope with the absolute best graphics on the market. Furthermore, the notion of enthusiast cards sporting less than 4GB memory has become less of an issue. Of course, whenever we're tackling more affordable GPUs, the settings will be altered accordingly and detailed for clarity. Identical settings are used for all resolutions, 1080, 1440, 2160, and 1440 Ultrawide, unless otherwise stated. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Graphics Settings For this game, we use the Very High preset, with some small changes to increase the Texture Filtering, turn off the AA, and all V-Sync settings. Preset: Custom Fullscreen: On Exclusive Fullscreen: Off DirextX 12: On VSync: Off Anti-aliasing: Off Texture Quality: Very High Texture Filtering: 16x Anisotropic Shadow Quality: Very High Sun Soft Shadows: High Depth of Field: Very High Level of Detail: Very High Dynamic Foliage: High Ambient Occlusion: On PureHair: Off Specular Reflection Quality: Normal Vignette Blur: On Motion Blur: On Bloom: On Tesselations: On Screen Space Reflections: On Lens Flares: On Screen Effects: On Film Grain: On Rise of the Tomb Raider Graphics Settings Preset: Custom Fullscreen: On Exclusive Fullscreen: Off DirextX 12: On MSAA: Off VSync: Off Texture Quality: Very High Texture Filtering: 16x Anisotropic Shadow Quality: Very High Ambient Occlusion: Very High Contact Hardening Shadows: On Parallax Occlusion Mapping: High Depth of Field: Very High Level of Detail: Very High Volumetric Lighting: On Screenspace Reflections: On Temporal Anti-Aliasing: Disabled Motion Blur: On Sharpen: On Bloom: On Lens Flares: On Cloth Physics: On Subsurface Scattering: On Chromatic Aberration: On Tesselations: On Far Cry Primal Graphics Settings Graphics Quality: Custom HD Textures: On Textures: Very High Shadow: Ultra Post FX: High Geometry: Ultra Terrain: Very High Water: Very High Environment: High Anti-Aliasing: Off Volumetric Fog: Very High Motion Blur: On Ghost Recon: Wildlands Graphics Settings Preset: Custom Antialiasing: Off Ambient Occlusion: SSBC Draw Distance: Very High Level of Detail: Ultra Texture Quality: Ultra Anisotropic Filtering: 16 Shadow Quality: Ultra Terrain Quality: Ultra Vegetation Quality: Ultra Turf Effects: Off Motion Blur: On Iron Sights DOF: On High-Quality DOF: On Bloom: On God Raws: Enhanced Subsurface Scattering: On Lens Flare: On Long-Range Shadows: Ultra Software 3DMark Firestrike 3DMark Time Spy Unique Superposition Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Rise of the Tomb Raider Far Cry Primal Ghost Recon: Wildlands CPU-ID HWMonitor TechPowerUp GPU-Z Noise Everyone has their own reasonable noise level when it comes to comes to components on a computer. Some can handle all fans at 100% load to keep temperatures down; some want an entirely silent computer. To accurately gauge the noise output of a graphics card, we position a Precision Gold N05CC Decibel meter from one metre above our open air test bench and take an average reading at idle and load. Power Consumption With electricity becoming increasingly expensive across most parts of the world the need for computer components to become power efficient has never been more relevant. Graphics cards are often the most power-hungry components of a desktop system so having an efficient graphics card is crucial to keeping power bills under control. Power is tied to heat, so lower power consumption means a graphics card is likely to run slightly cooler and put out less heat into your system meaning your other components will run cooler with improved longevity. AMD and NVIDIA have both made power consumption an integral part of the way graphics cards dynamically overclock, so the need for graphics card vendors to use efficient VRM and PCB designs is becoming essential to maximise performance. We take power readings during idle state with no background applications running. Then again at 25%, 50%, and 99% completion of the Unigine Superposition benchmark, using the average as the final published result. Temperatures The cooling solution which graphics card vendors choose to implement is one of the main differences that consumers have to contend with when selecting a graphics cards. Apart from their acoustic properties, the thermal properties of graphics card coolers are critical. Lower temperatures are always better, and with AMD and NVIDIA opting to use dynamic overclocking algorithms that take temperature into account, it is important that graphics card vendors use high-performance cooling solutions to maximise performance. The era of graphics cards reaching critical temperatures are now in the past, but the importance of low temperatures remains. Lower temperatures mean better stability, longer component longevity and lower fan speeds. We take temperature readings after 10 minutes of desktop idle with no background programs running, then take the recorded maximum delivered from Unigine Superposition after a 4K optimised run, confirming the numbers are accurate with HWMonitor. Ambient temperature is always kept +/- 1c from 21c. 3DMark This is a faster version of the fastest card we've ever tested, so as you might expect, it tops out everything single test 3DMark has to offer, and it beats the stock Nvidia offering by a significant margin too! Unigine Superposition Superposition is a demanding benchmark, but again we see this card leapfrogging the stock 1080 Ti. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided It's at this point in the review I feel like saying "can you guess how this card performs in every single benchmark?" If you guessed the top of every chart, you would be right; what's amazing is by how much. Rise of the Tomb Raider Want to game at 4K or extremely high refresh rates? Look no further! Far Cry Primal Far Cry didn't see as big an improvement over the stock card, but faster is faster, even if it's just a little. Ghost Recon: Wildlands Demanding settings make this game a real challenge, even for the most extreme graphics cards. However, the ASUS 1080 Ti absolutely destroys anything else we've ever tested, pretty much what you would want from an £800 GPU! Overclocking Amazingly, the "stock" performance of this GPU wasn't all that it had to offer. With a simple increase to the power limit (max), and a slight ramp up of the fan profiles, I was able to squeeze, and I mean SQUEEZE out another 80 Mhz on the GPU boost clock. Amazingly, I got another 250 MHz out of the memory and combined this meant we took our score of 5828 to 6143. That's over 5.25% faster than it was out of the box, and just over 10% faster than the stock Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti! That's pretty freaking amazing. Acoustic, Thermal and Power Testing Acoustic Performance With a heat sink that looks big enough to cool industrial hardware, this card can, rather amazingly, still run completely passive up to around 60c. Even when the fans kick in it's far from the loudest card we've ever tested, and around 5 dBa quieter than the blower cooler on the stock Nvidia 1080 Ti. Thermal Performance Another blinding result here, with the card running almost 20c cooler than the stock card... that's insane. Power Usage This card does use a lot of power, but it's far from inefficient, as we've seen in our test results it's not wasting that power, it's turning it into FPS at a savage pace. Final Thoughts Price First, you should pull up a comfortable seat and then pour yourself a stiff drink, because the flagship card from ASUS doesn't come cheap. Even if you're doing well financially, £799.99 is still enough to make your wallet tremble with fear. While it's a shame that cards like this cost so much, this is enthusiast hardware and far beyond what most consumers truly need. Therefore, if you want the best, expect to pay up for it. Overview The performance on this graphics card is absolutely mental. It's like hammering in a thumbtack with a sledgehammer in terms of its rendering power. In every benchmark we ran, it decimated the competition by an embarrassing margin. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti card was already thundering ahead of the GTX 1080, and the RoG STRIX edition is even faster, cooler, and quieter; it's also more expensive, but hey, what ya gonna do! Therefore, I'll speak no more of the performance; it's as black and white as "it's the best we've ever tested." The build quality on this card is pretty hardcore too, with a large cooling shroud over one of the biggest GPU heatsinks I've ever seen. However, this does mean that the card is incredibly heavy. A thick metal backplate, which adds more weight its self, does help keep it straight and true. Also, the power delivery system has been heavily upgraded with much more durable hardware. A robust set of chokes and two 8-pin PCI power connectors give this power hungry card the stable voltages it requires to deliver such... ah, I said I wasn't talking about the performance again. It's a hard card to discuss without sounding like you're treading into hyperbole, but credit where credit is due. It's a fantastic card, it looks great with all its RGB thrills, it's super quiet and even completely silent in low loads, and it hails from one of the biggest and most widely known gaming brands in the world. If you can afford it, it'll be an impressive upgrade no matter what card you're already running. Pros Insanely fast performance Incredible aesthetics Good display connectivity Two system fan headers Powerful and quiet cooling Zero RPM fan mode RGB lighting Cons The price, £800 big ones is a tough pill to swallow "If you want to get the absolute best performance while gaming at 4K, on high refresh rate displays, multi-display Surround, and VR, then the ASUS RoG STRIX GTX 1080 Ti is going to put a huge smile on your face. Most important of all, you'll barely remember the price after you've taken it for a few rounds in your favourite game."