Nvidia GTX 1080 Performance Review - The New King
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
2,334 words · ~11 min read
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it has been quite some time since NVIDIA has graced us with a new 80 series GPU
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20 months in fact since the last one so we got the gtx 1080 in hands it felt
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like a momentous occasion especially with the vive and the oculus rift so
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recently hitting market and since NVIDIA is building their new
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1080s pascal architecture as one of their most ambitious projects yet and
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saying that it can beat out their flagship titan x and a pair of 980s in
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sli i think it's time to see if it can live up to the hype
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so the gtx 1080 is their first card in their new line of pascal gpus continuing
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the tradition of NVIDIA naming new generations of gpus after old dead guys
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who were legendarily good at physics and math and speaking of math the cards
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gp104 GPU can certainly do a lot of processing with 2560 cuda cores
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1733 megahertz base clock and a 16
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nanometer process which is able to allow them to pack way more transistors onto
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the chip for increased performance NVIDIA also switched to a new type of
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vram called gddr5x which runs at about 10 gigabits per second NVIDIA says that
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gddr5x combined with various improvements like memory compression it
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ends up being 1.7 times faster in terms of effective memory bandwidth than a gtx
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980. they crammed eight gigabytes of this stuff inside the 1080 but if you
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are more inclined to go for the 1070 when that comes out it also has 8
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gigabytes but just more standard gddr5
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so keep that in mind if you will be disappointed by buying a product that
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has slightly less x's on its product sheet
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but beyond raw specs there were also some other features that NVIDIA baked
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into the pascal pie such as simultaneous multi-projection which allows pascal to
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project 16 different viewports each with the ability to rotate in order to better
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match the current display setup that you have and it has the ability to project
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more than one of these viewports at once this enables graphics techniques such as
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perspective surround which can correct image perspectives across multiple
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monitors so you don't get that weird warping on multi-monitor surround
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anymore and like massive scale issues and stuff that should be fixed then
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there's a personal favorite of mine single pass stereo this allows pascal to
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render geometry for an object in vr only
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once instead of twice per eye then it just uses simple transforms to generate
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the view for both eyes but if you're not really into vr and you
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want something for the desktop side never fear there's something for you as
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well and that's called multi-res shading NVIDIA included multi-res shading for
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the desktop guys as well it allows you to focus more of your GPU power near the
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center of the screen and less on the outside this will result in higher
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resolution and detail in the middle and lower resolution and detail on the
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outside where you are theoretically paying less attention to this should
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help performance but we'll see if it really matters later on
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when used for vr various smp techniques including the ones not fully covered
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here equate to 1.5 times the pixel
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throughput and two times the geometry throughput than would otherwise have
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been possible then there's ansel technology which was introduced to take
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gaming screenshots to the next level which sounds like the most boring thing
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possible but just hang with me it allows you to take screenshots from any angle
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and position by using a free-floating camera that can detach from your
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character it also allows you to run simple filters over these images for
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that oh so professional instagram look it also allows you to take raw or exr
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photos giving you full dynamic range for all your image editing needs it takes
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said photos or screenshots in super resolution which is currently limited to
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4.5 gigapixel images with 3600 cuda stitched
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tiles this limitation is because of game settings the resolution of the game and
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the speed of your storage drive so it should actually be expected to increase
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in the future and last but not least is 360 degree photos so you can capture
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those legendary fight scenes in awesomely unique ways and then view them
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in vr or whatever although when all is said and done i expect most of the
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pictures from ansel will be using the free camera to capture derpy faces of
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npcs ansel does have to be enabled by the
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developer and right now there's only a relatively short list of games that
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support it and i wouldn't expect a huge amount of multiplayer games to either
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yes the division is included but i think it's not going to be in the dark zone
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that's it for ansel and then we come to vr works audio and vr works touch vr
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audio can trace the physical path of sound to give you a more realistic
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experience while you're using a headset and vr touch uses phys x to improve on
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how things in the environment react with your virtual hands both of these should
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make pretty good improvements in terms of immersion in the future once they're
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more implemented now we got our hands on the founders edition which sounds fancy
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but is really just what NVIDIA is calling the reference version of this
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card and is selling for 6.99 a full
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more than the msrp for base models from add-in partners whose cards i expect to
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see at computex like they were last time so stay tuned to Linus tech tips for
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that NVIDIA is trying to justify the higher cost by saying that they're using
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premium components in manufacturing like die cast aluminum and a low profile
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backplate along with a vapor chamber which should improve cooling but it's
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important to note that the chips in the founder's edition boards shouldn't be
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binned in any way the cooler for the 1080 is similar to the silver and black
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shrouds and blower style fan that we've seen NVIDIA doing for quite a while now
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but has a more angled aggressive look reminiscent of basically every
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environment in the last deus ex game the connectivity support is good as it
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features HDMI 2.0 for 4k at 60 hertz
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three displaypoint 1.4 connectors for 4k at 120 hertz or 8k at 60 hertz holy crap
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and a dual link dvi however the 1080 only supports two-way sli natively even
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though it has two sli fingers that is because the 2s live fingers have been
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teamed together to improve bandwidth with the new sli bridge NVIDIA no longer
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recommends three and four-way sli which is probably a good thing to be honest
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but they do suggest if you need to burn that much money on that many cards that
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you do two-way sli and have a third card just for phys x but it is possible to
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force three-way and four-way sli if you sign up for NVIDIA enthusiast key which
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registers your card i expect an even worse experience from this form of sli
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than past versions of sli and would wholeheartedly
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not recommend it all in all NVIDIA has called this the largest chip processor
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endeavor in the history of humanity with a multi-billion dollar budget which
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NVIDIA's ceo speculated might be enough to go to mars but as NVIDIA is in the
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business of making gpus not sending people off to other worlds for
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interplanetary lan parties let's move on and just a note if it
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seems like we don't have a lot of AMD cards in our testing it's because the
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new polaris AMD architecture which is supposed to compete with pascal is right
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around the corner it's not quite here yet we'll have much more from the red
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team when those cards drop with that being said let's have a look at how the
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benchmarking turned out all the testing was done at 4k because what's the point
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of running things at lower res when you have the power of something like a 1080
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and speaking of which if you do have this nice setup but a 1080p monitor it's
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better to run your games at higher resolutions anyways with super sampling
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and then just have them displayed on your 1080p monitor if you're wondering how to do that check the guide up here
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we are waiting for the vr games market to mature a bit before we test it very
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much because it's a little bit messy right now but we did throw crisis 3 and
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star wars battlefront at the 1080 and various other cars to see how they would
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perform and the 1080 solidly beat the fury x and titan x and then ran right
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alongside the sli 980s which was quite impressive having a single card run toe
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to toe with a dual card setup while being just over half the price is a
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strong start for our new funny-named friend for directx 12 performance we
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booted up rise of the tomb raider and hitman the 1080 pulled off some
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impressive numbers crushing the titan x and laughing at the 980s as they flopped
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around and confused sli enabled circles as they struggled with poor dx12
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optimizations AMD's performance here was stronger than the 900 series but the
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1080 was still able to manage an overall victory
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while those numbers were a little bit all over the directx 11 performance for
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these games was more of a standard curve with performance expectations lining up
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nice and orderly if you're aiming for 4k at 60fps then the 1080 will not
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disappoint as it's able to run everything on high presets near or above
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60 frames per second proving the respectively cheaper and when looking at
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the titan x better performing option on the NVIDIA side for power draw the
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entire bench only drew 252 watts from
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the wall which gives you a ton of options in terms of lower wattage
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power supplies or even sfx power supplies and whatnot the thermals were
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standard fare from NVIDIA with all of our cards holding steady at around 81 to
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83 degrees celsius sorry NVIDIA's claims about it beating a
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titan x and sli 980 is true i'd say
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mostly it does cleanly beat the titan x across the board but putting it up
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against a 980 duo is a bit more of a mixed bag it won some of the benchmarks
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but lost others the loss is however at least in actual games were quite narrow
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and in any event the 1080 is clearly the better choice for newer games especially
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when they have dx12 support and it frees you from the well documented issues with
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sli for dollars per frame we're assuming a value of 599 for the 1080 in our
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calculations as we expect whatever you're able to get from the add-in board
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partners should either match or beat the reference founders edition card while
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being a hundred dollars cheaper so this dollars per frame is for pascal 1080 in
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general not the founders edition the 1080 blows everything away in this
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metric except for the r9 390 x in hitman
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specifically but when you consider that the 390x has lower frame rates across
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the board it's still a pretty darn compelling value to get an aftermarket
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1080. so what's our conclusion well for 599 dollars if that is your budget for a
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card the 1080 is a no-brainer it's ability to hit 60fps at 4k with lots of
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eye candy in the latest titles combined with per frame cost that's basically the
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lowest in the world of high-end graphics cards right now it's a pretty obvious
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choice again if that is your budget we still haven't gotten a single GPU card
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that can run 4k games at 60fps with max
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settings without breaking a sweat and at 600 the 1080 is still pretty steep in
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terms of pricing but it is the king of the hill for now it'll be interesting to
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see what results we can get with overclocking as NVIDIA is claiming a lot
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in that department and how well AMD's polaris will answer this challenge
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especially once directx 12 games hit the market later this year thanks for
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watching guys hopefully the animal noise is
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weren't too annoying this was filmed in mexico we are not back yet um although
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the embargo will be like six hours after we land or something so
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if you liked the video like it if you disliked it and you were like this was filmed in a ghetto way and there's
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animal noises you can dislike it be subscribed if you
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want to see more coverage of the 1080 if it's anything like 980 we'll release a
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lot of videos on it uh if you want a t-shirt that's cool you can check out
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the link in the description down below you can become a contributor on the forum you can use our amazon affiliate
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code to buy stuff like new gpus in the next little while polaris
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pascal which one you get which p are you deciding to go for i don't know it's up
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to you uh yeah check out this video this is the launch
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video for the gtx 980. i don't know why you would watch it right now but go
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watch it anyways and i'll see you next time