Palit GTX 1080 Ti GameRock Review
Up Close
Although we’ve said how nice it is for Palit to come to us with something that doesn’t just replicate the type of card and packaging that we’ve seen dozens of times before, we’re still unsure of the decision to clone the Guitar Hero font for the box. It just looks a bit like all those dodgy chinese copies of things that swamp eBay. Fortunately boxes exist to be opened and stuffed in a cupboard so it’s not really an issue.
The cooler follows the design of the GameRock GTX 1070 we’ve previously looked at. Dual fans move the air across one of the thickest heatsinks we’ve seen recently. Well, we say dual fans but actually the Palit has four fans, with two fans back to back to eliminate any vortices. Four fans are louder than two though so we hope that this setup has all the cooling you would expect to find from four fans without the requisite noise increase.
This is a 2 1/2 slot cooler so it is important to take that into account if you want to go with an SLI setup. The blue will probably be the part which splits the audience, particularly as we’ve so quickly become accustomed to neutral colouring with RGB lighting. On the plus side, once the card is installed you almost never see the shroud, and certainly behind a smoked window you don’t.
You get a real feel for the robust nature of the heatsink in the side on shot. Beefy heatpipes, plenty of fins giving a huge surface area, and enough space in the middle to ensure good airflow. This has the potential to be the coolest twin fan cooler that we’ve seen on a GTX 1080 Ti. The backplate, now a feature of all high end GPUs, has a big GameRock logo which has the benefit of facing the correct way, something which isn’t always true.
Elsewhere the GameRock follows the hallmarks of a GTX 1080 Ti with 8+8 PCIe power inputs, HDMI, DVI-D and three DisplayPort outputs. The plate has as many holes as any we’ve seen which should assist dispersing the hot air generated by your frenetic gaming efforts. Lastly the logo is RGB as we have come to expect from pretty much all modern hardware, although we wouldn’t recommend using green as shown here, it clashes with the blue somewhat.
