ASUS GTX 1080 Strix Review
Test Setup
ASUS GTX 1080 Strix
Intel i7 6850K
ASUS X99 Strix
Corsair ROG Dominator Platinum 3200
Corsair RM100i
Corsair LX 512GB OS
Corsair LS 480GB x2 Raid0 Games
Corsair H100i
Windows 10 Â Â
Overclocking and Testing Methodology
Whether you’re a regular reader of OC3D or just passing through, you’ll know that we’ve spent years extolling the virtues of overclocking, seeking ways to bring the performance benefits to everybody, whether an experienced enthusiast or a brand-new PC owner.Â
Our primary desire has always been to dispel the myth of overclocking as something that is both a black art and dangerous. In recent years manufacturers have been following this path of opening overclocking to the masses. With the last generation of nVidia GPUs and their GPU Boost 2.0 we saw drastically diminishing returns from our overclocking efforts, such was the excellence of nVidias driver solution. GPU Boost 3.0 improves the already excellent driver-based overclocking until it’s nearly indistinguishable from our own. Rather than spend days tweaking and testing to only achieve an additional 50MHz, and force you to take up more of your busy lives reading carbon-copy results, we’re solely utilising the automatic overclocking for the foreseeable future.
This has three main benefits. Firstly it gives you results that you’ll achieve, freed from the worry that your model wont achieve the same overclock. Secondly, it frees up our time to bring you a wider variety of product reviews, and lastly it makes our graphs easier to read by simplifying them.
Speaking of simplification we’ve taken the opportunity afforded to us by the move to Windows 10 and DirectX 12 to refresh our gaming test suite. This, of course, means that we’ve got some titles with just today’s Strix review in the graph but there is no point in having titles which are unreflective of modern gaming just for the sake of having old comparison results. Eventually you have to bite the bullet and move on. We have, however, retained some of our older results so that you can draw a clear performance line between the last generation and this.
In case you were in any doubt of the wisdom of this course of action, look at the enormous numbers available above when you get your hands dirty overclocking the card manually. 2.1GHz Core clock at a mere 70°C. If that doesn’t have you reaching for your wallet then nothing will. What is more surprising though is the image below. The GPUBoost3 actually boosts the card to 2050MHz without having to touch a thing. Yes thats correct, manual overclocking only got us an extra 60MHz, this is great news for some and will disappoint others. What camp are you in?