When Nvidia released the GeForce GTX 1080 last month, it was the biggest intergenerational performance leap that we've seen in six years. The GTX 1080 offers a massive 60% increase in performance over the GTX 980 that it's replacing. It does this while staying in roughly the same power envelope, making the GTX 1080 the most impressive GPU we have seen in recent memory.
Since first testing the reference Founders Edition GTX 1080 a month ago, we have been eagerly anticipating getting our hands on the board partner versions. The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 G1 Gaming is a triple fan cooled 1080 that also boasts a redesigned PCB. Even though it's currently out of stock pretty much everywhere, we expect availability to improve shortly.
When it comes to custom designed graphics cards, Gigabyte almost always does a great job -- for instance, we particularly liked the design of their Gigabyte GTX 780 GHz Edition and Radeon R9 290X OC graphics cards. So, when we got the opportunity to check out the new G1 Gaming version of the GTX 1080, we pounced right on it.