ASUS Strix GTX 1080 11GB/s Overview
Conclusion
To use a well-worn cliché, the GTX 1080 Plus doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It isn’t going to make your trousers explode with happiness and your socks will remain firmly in place. What it does do is give a nice final hurrah for a graphics card which barely feels like it was out of short trousers before the Titanium appeared and rendered it pointless.
The additional memory bandwidth is never going to set the world on fire, but any extra performance will naturally be beneficial, so the 130-odd MHz memory speed increase leading to around 10% extra total memory bandwidth per second has to be a good thing. In seriously un-optimised games it can bring you a few frames, and even in the better coded examples it might be just enough to smooth off those occasional frame drops when a bit texture suddenly gets loaded. We need to balance this out though because you could easily buy the older model cheaply if you can find one and just manually overclock the memory yourself to the same levels and even beyond if you know what you are doing and normally that would be what we would tell you to do and until the package arrived it was what we actually had planned.
The problem was with this particular example of the GTX 1080 11GB/s, the ASUS Strix, is the implementation of the improved GTX 1080 Ti cooler to the recipe. It’s a teensy bit thicker and a natural evolution of the DirectCU formula that has been the cornerstone of the ASUS graphics card range for a long time. What it does do is lower the temperatures of the Strix from 70°C on the regular GTX 1080 to a mere 59°C on this GTX 1080 11GB/s.
Eleven degrees cooler is a massive step, and as you would expect a cooler card means the fans don’t work as hard which stops you going deaf in intense moments. Not that with the Strix fans you’d ever go deaf as such, but it just helps keep things even quieter than they already were. Additionally the nVidia GPU Boost technology revels in thermal headroom and so it will overclock harder for longer, improving your average boost clocks which in turn improve your gaming performance.
Nothing here will convince you to purchase a GTX 1080 Strix if you weren’t planning on doing so anyway, it’s a GTX 1080 that is cooler and quieter than the original, so if you were saving furiously to add a Pascal GPU to your system then this could be perfect choice. If you want to save yourself some money and temperatures do not bother you then then grab an old model while you still can. We would award the new model the same award we did the old model when first launched, sadly your job is that little bit harder trying to decide what one you should be buying.
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