EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Gaming Review

Features & Specifications

In contrast to Asus and Gigabyte, which arm their GeForce GTX 1080 Tis with 2.5-slot coolers (that of course monopolize three slots), EVGA remains faithful to a true two-slot design for its GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Gaming. Of course, that requires squeezing everything possible from the smaller form factor. This approach has obvious benefits, though, since there aren't many "narrow" 1080 Tis out there, and Nvidia's Founders Edition gets hotter than the rest.

Since the actual performance of any third-party card depends on the GPU Boost frequency it can sustain, and thus on cooling, power limits, and processor quality, any review that relies on bar charts is little more than a snapshot of a single specimen. That's why we're putting our emphasis on the actual implementation of each model. To that end, a lot of equipment goes into thoroughly documenting a graphics card's behaviors. If you'd like a peek at what goes into such an evaluation, check out our Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB Review. It makes for a good baseline on which EVGA builds.

Specifications

The Package, Dimensions & Interfaces

EVGA's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Gaming looks nice and sports a slender profile, but it's no toy. It isn't a lightweight piece of hardware either, weighing in at 1348 grams.

The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Gaming's gross length is 30.2cm from the slot bracket's outer edge to the shroud's back, making it longer than the Aorus GTX 1080 Ti Xtreme Edition 11G we reviewed recently. A 14cm height is taller, too. Fortunately, it's a 3.5cm thickness measurement that matters for fitting this card into two expansion slots, rather than three. Do remember the backplate, though: it requires an extra 0.5cm of clearance on the other side, which could affect enthusiasts with large CPU coolers.

Though the cover is mostly made of plastic, it's pretty classy-looking, largely because EVGA does a good job of imitating aluminum. You can't really tell the difference until you touch the fan shroud. On the card's other side, a two-part backplate doubles as a passive cooler.

The top is dominated by backlit "EVGA" and "GeForce GTX 1080 Ti" logos, as well as an LED indicator with "FTW3" printed on it. A pair of eight-pin power connectors is up there as well.

Peeking into the top and bottom reveals that the cooler's fins are oriented vertically. They also reveal the absence of a real VRM heat sink, which would have helped with cooling. In its place, there's a flat frame.

The card's back side reveals two 8mm heat pipes and three 6mm pipes for the right part of the cooler structure. From this angle, a sixth heat pipe (8mm) is not visible.

Similar to Zotac's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti AMP Extreme, EVGA exposes a fairly standard complement of one HDMI 2.0 output, three DisplayPort 1.4-capable connectors, and a dual-link DVI-D port. Of those five interfaces, a maximum of four can be used simultaneously in a multi-monitor setup. The rest of the slot plate is dotted with openings for airflow, though they're not really functional due to EVGA's fin design.

A GPU-Z screenshot provides the most pertinent technical information, even if the GPU Boost values we observed were much higher than EVGA's official specifications.

Test System & Measurement Methods

We explained our test system and methodology in How We Test Graphics Cards. If you want to learn more about the procedures we're using in today's review, have a look at that story.

Since its publication, however, we did beef up our platform and CPU cooling, mostly to rule out the possibility of a processor-imposed bottleneck. This is particularly important given the flagship status of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

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