EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2: A ferocious graphics card with a radical cooler

TESTED IN PCWORLD LABS

In this section, hardware & software go through rigorous testing.

EVER SINCE THE MONSTROUS $700 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (go.pcworld.com/gtx1080tirev) launched, the world’s been waiting to see what this beastly GPU was capable of in the hands of Nvidia’s hardware partners. The Founders Edition delivered damn near uncompromising 60-fps performance at 4K resolution with everything cranked to 11, and that was with a lowly reference cooler and stock clock speeds. How far can factory-overclocked versions with potent custom cooling solutions go?

Well, for the first time ever, a graphics card is so damn fast that it managed to largely push a game’s bottleneck off of the GPU and onto the CPU in PCWorld’s ferocious testing PC—while running 15 degrees or more cooler than the Founders Edition.

And the EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2 ($720 preorder on Amazon, go.pcworld.com/gtx1080tiamz) isn’t even EVGA’s fastest custom GTX 1080 Ti.

Damn.

Meet the EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2

Before we dive into the customizations EVGA made to the SC2, here’s a refresher on the GTX 1080 Ti’s default technical specs, built around the full-fat version of Nvidia’s GP102 graphics processor.

The major difference under the hood of EVGA’s card is the GPU clock speed. The GTX 1080 Ti SC2 hums along at a 1,556MHz clock and 1,670MHz boost clock. That’s a healthy 88MHz leap over the GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition boost clock—heck, the EVGA card’s base clock is a mere 26MHz away from the stock version’s boost clock. The numbers aren’t as concrete as they seem, however, as the GTX 1080