The flood gates have opened. The deluge has begun. Tech reviewers across the globe can breathe easy as the NDA gets lifted and the green light to publish finally begins to glow. The big news is that the new flagship card from Nvidia is without doubt going to cause a seismic shift in performance metrics, pushing way ahead of today’s Titan X and GTX 980 Ti cards while simultaneously being more efficient overall.

The new reference card, or Founders Edition GTX 1080 landed in the hands of ccokeman from OverclockersClub who has done a solid job of breaking down all the details for us. Like any good review we have a look at the PCB and the cooler design, plus benchmarks and a first look at how the card overclocks. Ccokeman managed to push the card to 2,050MHz using the reference cooler, a nice push of 18% over stock clocks of 1,733MHz.

“The best combination of results that I was able to run all of the game tests with came in at a GPU Boost 3.0 clock speed of 2050MHz on the Pascal core. In some game tests 2076MHz to 2088MHz was perfectly stable, but not in all games. This gives the end user about an extra 315MHz of headroom to play with that does indeed drive the performance to another level.”

“Micron's GDDR5X memory also plays well when you start clocking it up. I was able to push the 8GB of GDDR5X memory to a data rate of 11Gbps. This final step again helps with memory bandwidth to get you that last bit of performance out of the GTX 1080. Having good architecture and a great power delivery system help improve performance across the board by allowing stable overclocking at high levels.”

“The last piece of the puzzle is how well the Founders Edition cooling works when the screws are put to it. Keeping the card somewhere south of 70 °C goes a long way towards helping deliver added performance from overclocking.”

Check out the full and detailed review over on OverclockersClub.