Zotac shrinks Nvidia’s GTX 1080 Ti for small form factor gaming

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is a monster graphics card that makes it possible to game at 4K without adding a second GPU to the equation. Despite its big time pixel pushing capabilities, the card itself does not have be huge. Zotac has proven otherwise with a miniature variant that delivers the same performance as a full-size card on a much shorter PCB.

A card like this is really built for small form factor (SFF) setups where elbow room is in short supply. The concern, of course, is cooling—cramped systems tend to have a more difficult time dissipating heat buildup, which in turn can cause a graphics card to throttle more often. Nobody likes that.

In this instance, Zotac outfitted its fun-size 1080 Ti with two cooling fans. interestingly enough one of them measures 90mm with wide and flat fan blades, and the other measures 100mm with wide and curved fan blades.

Underneath the fans is a finned aluminum block with five 6mm copper heatpipes snaking through. There is also a copper cold block that makes direct contact with the GPU. The final touch is an all-metal backplate.

Zotac's card draws power from two 8-pin PCIe connectors. Sticking to reference specs, the GPU has a 1,506MHz base clock and 1,620MHz boost block. It also retains the full 11GB of GDDR5X memory as found on full-size variants. If cooling permits, you can overclock the card yourself using Zotac's Firestrom utility. You can also adjust fan speed through Firestorm.

As for connectivity, the card is equipped with three DisplayPort 1.4 ports, an HDMI 2.0b port, and a dual-link DVI-D port.

Zotac did not say when its miniature GTX 1080 Ti will be available or for how much.

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).