Temperature, Noise and 1-Click OC
Galax GTX 1080 HOF – Temperature
The Galax GTX 1080 HOF features a very large cooler design, and even the VRAMs and MOSFETs are cooled by an aluminum heatsink. The fans don’t turn off even in idle or light load situations, but it keeps the card cool all the time. Temperature can go as low are 44° Celsius on light or idle; and can go as high as 73° to 75° Celsius on full load. You may get lower (or higher) temperature depending on the room temperature or the overall cooling performance of your system.
Galax GTX 1080 HOF – Noise
Like I said, the fans do not turn off and they ran around ~40% to 60% depending on the load. But the fans are very silent, inaudible most of the time specially if you have a closed casing. The fans only get really loud when you press that button at back (on the output ports), where the fans’ speed cranks up to 3000+ RPM. They do get (very) loud and I suggest to only use this if you want to quickly push the hot air out from the graphics card.
Galax GTX 1080 HOF – 1-Click OC
Out of the box, the Galax GeForce GTX 1080 HOF 8GB is already a fast graphics card, it comes with a factory overclock settings of 1733MHz-1873MHz vs the 1607MHz-1733MHz (base-boost) of a GTX 1080 Founders Edition. However, if you want to squeeze out a little bit more juice from the graphics card, you can push it a little bit further, 5% to be exact, using the 1-click OC. Other companies, calls this “OC mode”, and if you have been reading news about graphics cards these past few months, there was an issue were the samples sent to reviewers are set to OC mode out of the box; meaning they have a slightly higher clock speed compared to what actually consumers get out of the box. And the only way to avail of that OC mode is you need to install the software utility of the respective company and enable the OC mode from there. Well, the good news is, there is no shady tactics from Galax here. We got a retail sample and the clock speeds are set at their default factory overclock speeds just like any other GTX 1080 HOF 8GB out there.
Turning on the 1-click OC and pushing the card 5% higher will get you a base clock speed of 1827MHz and a boost clock speed of 1967MHz to 2038MHz (on full load). That’s already around ~14% increase in the clock speed from the reference or GTX 1080 Founders Edition. Now the actual performance you get while playing games may be or may not be that significant. It depends on the game or your settings. You may get a 5 to 10 frame per second increase or higher.
Finally, let’s check out the benchmark results we got while testing the Galax GTX 1080 HOF 8GB…
you should compare 1080 to 1080, not other inferior cards.
we’d love to. unfortunately we don’t have any other 1080s.