Galax GeForce GTX 1080 HOF 8GB (Hall of Fame) Review – The White Beast!

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080, announced and released mid this year, is currently one of the fastest single graphics card in the market. The fastest one is the Titan X (Pascal) by the way, but geared towards another market or niche. It features some of the latest technologies like GDDR5X, a faster version of your typical GDDR5 VRAM, NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture and many more. Today, we are going to look at and review the Galax GeForce GTX 1080 HOF 8GB (Hall of Fame) Edition, featuring an all-white design including the PCB and a massive cooler design. If you are gaming at 1440p or 4K UHD and you are currently looking for a white-themed graphics card for your gaming rig or system, stick around and check out our Galax GTX 1080 HOF review below.

Galax GTX 1080 HOF 8GB Review

Galax’s Hall of Fame branding signifies their top of the line or flagship products. It’s simply the best or fastest they have for the consumers. First let’s talk about the general features of a GeForce GTX 1080. Like all GTX 1080 in the market, Galax’s GTX 1080 HOF is based on NVIDIA’s new Pascal architecture featuring a full GP104 die based on a 16nm FinFET fab process. This architecture design is basically faster and more power efficient that the previous Maxwell architecture.

NVIDIA’s GP104 Pascal rocks 7.2 billion transistors, 2560 single-precision CUDA cores, 20 streaming multiprocessors enabled, 64 ROPs and is capable of delivering 9 TFLOPs of single-precision floating point performance (see GPGPU benchmark below). NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 FE offers a base clock of 1607 MHz with a boost clock speed of 1733 MHz. Non-reference GTX 1080, like Galax’s GTX 1080 HOF offers higher clock speeds out of the box; a.k.a factory overclocked speeds.

With the GTX 1080, NVIDIA has also introduced the use of GDDR5X memory, offering significant bandwidth improvement vs GDDR5, at 10Gbps. The GTX 1080 features 8GB of GDDR5X running on a 256-bit memory interface, with a 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The GTX 1080 has a GPU thermal threshold of 94° Celsius and a TDP of 180 Watts; and has a recommended system PSU of 500W. But for the Galax GTX 1080 HOF, you definitely want to stay on the safe side and use a 600W PSU or higher depending on the components installed in your system.

All of the new GeForce GTX 10 series graphics cards are basically equipped with the same set of features thanks to the Pascal architecture. These common features are Simultaneous Multi-Projection, VR Ready, NVIDIA Ansel, NVIDIA G-Sync, NVIDIA GameStream, Vulkan and DirectX 12 (12_1) API support, Fast Sync, better HDR support, NVIDIA SLI with the new High Bandwidth (HB) Bridge support and the new NVIDIA GPU Boost 3.0.

In addition to those general features, Galax has introduced added features on their GTX 1080 Hall of Fame Edition GPU. The Galax GTX 1080 HOF features premium materials such as PureOC 12 layer PCB layout, 12 + 3 phase digital power design, G Anti-noise inductance and ultra-low ESR and ultra-low noise operation.

The Galax GTX 1080 HOF also features an all new TriMax cooler design with three 90nm fans, anodized aluminum backplate and even the MOSFETs and memory are attached to a large aluminum sheet (via thermal pads) for heat dissipation. Galax has also added “HOF Lighting” where the “Hall of Fame” logo on the center side of the graphics card has RGB lighting effect. There is no lighting on the backplate or front cooler shroud though.

Below is a side by side comparison of the Galax GTX 1080 HOF and NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition specifications. Next page, we’ll take a closer look at the graphics card itself.

Galax GeForce GTX 1080 HOF 8GB Specifications