It's been a couple of weeks since the release of Nvidia's Founders Edition GTX 1080 and we?ve eagerly been waiting for the custom cards to hit the bench. Luckily the first one to hit our bench is the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW GAMING ACX 3.0. Completely packed with geeky goodness the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW GAMING ACX 3.0 is pushing a Pascal GP104 core running a base clock of 1721MHz and boost clock of 1860MHz. Thanks to the shrink from the 28nm process to the to the 16nm FinFET process Nvidia fielded a more efficient massively powerful GPU. How much more powerful you ask? Nvdia stuffed 7.2 billion transistors on a 314mm2 die for GTX 1080 on the Pascal GP 104 core. Looking back at what seems to be yesterday they stuffed 5.2 billion on a die 398mm2 for GTX 980. Doing a little spitball math that's 2 billion more on a 84mm2 smaller die. EVGA took the GTX 1080 design and put it on steroids on it using two 8 pin power connectors and ACX 3.0 cooling. That wasn't enough they had to double the phase power of the reference design and pop the FTW edition on the shelf with 10 power phases. The think tank was on double duty and the 1080 FTW runs a dual BIOS system and to up the bling factor put the card out with a semi industrial look backed with adjustable RGB lighting.

Lets talk geek for a bit. To reiterate the EVGA GTX 1080 FTW packs a 314mm² Die with 7.2 billion transistors on the Pascal core dubbed GP104 but how is that hardware deck stacked? The GP104 core on the EVGA GTX 1080 FTW is actually a GP104-A1 core variant with 2560 Stream Processors or single precision Cuda Cores and currently the worlds fastest consumer GPU design. (circa June 2016). The card has 160 texture units and 64 ROPS all on an un-compromised core with nothing snipped or clipped the GP 104-A1 core is fully enabled. The EVGA GTX 1080 FTW uses an unprecedented 8GB of GDDR5X from Micron and snubbed it's nose at the fledgling HBM features on last generation AMD Video Cards. The GDDR5X memory looks to be a much higher clocked version of GDDR5 and runs at a mind-boggling effective 10000MHz. The memory is pushed through a 256-bit memory interface and reaches a sky-high 320GB/s bandwidth.