I find it odd that a room full of otherwise seemingly normal human beings (press excluded) would cheer at being charged £700/$700 for the GTX 1080 Ti, even if it does claim to be the fastest gaming graphics card money can buy.After all, that £700 could otherwise be spent on an entire gaming PC, the latest iPhone, a return flight from London to Los Angeles, or 139 bottles of the finest Scottish craft beer.Besides, surely those Americans in attendance at Nvidia's grand GTX 1080 Ti reveal in San Francisco had more pressing things to worry about?Life isn't all graphics cards and iPhones when your health is on the line.Still, Nvidia was true to its word: the GTX 1080 Ti is indeed the fastest gaming graphics card money can buy—even faster than the £1,100/$1,200 e-peen extension that is the Titan X Pascal.It's a hell of a lot faster than the GTX 1080 too—which now sits in a "cheaper" price bracket of £500/$500—by as much as 30 percent.It's the first graphics card since the Titan XP that can play many games in 4K at 60FPS without having to fiddle with settings—you just whack everything on ultra and start playing.

Plus it's a quiet graphics card, in its Founders Edition form at least, thanks to the improvements Nvidia has made to its iconic all-metal shroud.But for all of Nvidia's bluster, it's hard not to be just a teensy bit disappointed.In all but memory capacity, which sits at an odd 11GB, the GTX 1080 Ti is a carbon copy of the Titan XP with a slightly higher clock speed.The likelihood of getting a fully unlocked GP102 GPU with all its cores enabled (a strategy taken with 780 Ti) seems slim.bitcoin exchange bustAnd with competition at this end of the market some months away—AMD has pencilled in a Q2 2017 release for Vega—there's little to stop Nvidia continuing to charge a premium for its top-of-the-range graphics cards, even if it's not the most expensive the company has released.bitcoin na linuxThose with deep enough pockets can pick up a Founders Edition GTX 1080 Ti directly from Nvidia on March 9, with partner cards arriving in the following weeks.ethereum wallet android

Both are priced at the same £700/$700, which makes a nice change from the premium Nvidia used to charge for the Founders Edition.That said, Nvidia hasn't got the best track record with getting graphics cards into shops on release day, so expect inflated prices until availability levels out.In Founders Edition form, the GTX 1080 Ti comes wrapped in Nvidia's slick, multifaceted cooling shroud—a blower-style design made of die-cast aluminium complete with a low-profile backplate and copper vapour chamber.move bitcoin to paypalNot everyone is a fan of the shard-like aesthetic (personally, I think it looks great), but there's no denying that it's a successful branding exercise—you can spot an Nvidia card a mile off.bitcoin switch walletInternally, Nvidia has made a few tweaks, starting with the removal of the DVI port.bitcoin irs currency

Those with older, but perfectly usable 30-inch dual-link DVI monitors may lament its removal, but the vast majority of modern monitors connect via HDMI or DisplayPort, with the GTX 1080 Ti sporting one of the former and three of the latter.Nvidia claims that by removing the DVI port, it's able to double the airflow compared to the GTX 1080 due to the larger exhaust area.Doubling airflow is an ambitious claim, but in a subjective listening test at least, the GTX 1080 Ti is seemingly quieter than its predecessors under load.It's not a dramatic change, and you'll certainly still hear the card if your PC isn't in a cupboard or under a desk, but any improvement to noise levels is welcome.The removal of the DVI port also means it's possible to create a single-slot water-cooled version of the GTX 1080 Ti without having to hack the port off or desolder it.Score one for the modders.Internally there's an improved seven-phase 2x dual-FET power design for cleaner power with less heat, which does a good job of feeding the GTX 1080 Ti's 250W TDP via its 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors.

At the heart of the GTX 1080 Ti is the same Pascal architecture GP102 GPU used in the Titan XP.There are the same 28 SMs and 3,584 CUDA cores out of a possible 3,840, meaning the GTX 1080 Ti still doesn't use a fully enabled GPU.If you want the full 3,840 you'll have to get the Quadro P6000, which costs roughly a bajillion pounds.Don't worry, though: the 1080 Ti has plenty of performance on tap.Nvidia's new graphics card has some special GDDR5X memory chips that can be pushed to an impressive 11GHz.Coupled with a 352-bit memory interface, the GTX 1080 Ti has a memory bandwidth of 484GB/s, which is a teensy bit higher than the Titan XP's 480GB/s and miles ahead of the GTX 1080's 320GB/s.That's not far off the 512GB/s of bandwidth pushed by AMD's Fury graphics cards, which are equipped with stacked High Bandwidth Memory ().Its upcoming Vega range, which will be equipped with HBM2, should push well beyond that, though.Such high bandwidth memory does wonders for games running at 4K and above, where high-resolution textures need to be pushed into memory, but there is a small compromise for GTX 1080 Ti buyers: you only get 11GB of memory instead of 12GB.

Nvidia has simply removed one of the 12 VRAM chips surrounding the GPU, resulting in the odd 352-bit memory interface and 88 ROPs.That's an understandable point of differentiation from a business standpoint: if Nvidia opted to strap 12GB of RAM to the 1080 Ti it would have a massive 528GB/s of bandwidth, completely blowing the Titan XP out of the water.Still, for the vast majority of people, particularly gamers, that missing 1GB of memory will make little difference to performance.Even those making use of the Titan X's decent FP16 performance in science applications could stand to make a significant saving by buying GTX 1080 Tis instead of Titan Xs.I have it on good authority, however, that the Titan X remains a compelling option, if only for those trying to cram as much graphics memory as possible into the limited space of a science server rack.Alongside the GTX 1080 Ti, Nvidia is dropping a few improvements to its drivers, as well as new features for developers.Most notable for consumers is further improved performance under DirectX 12.