ASUS has released graphics cards based on NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1060 and 1080 GPUs that are equipped with faster memory. The new add-in…
ASUS has released graphics cards based on NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1060 and 1080 GPUs that are equipped with faster memory. The new add-in-boards (AIBs) are designed to offer greater performance in high resolutions than reference designs and enable ASUS to charge a premium for the higher FPS.
Back in February when NVIDIA cut the price on the GTX 1080, the company also announced that they would be working with partners to sell factory overclocked cards with higher speed grades of memory. At launch the fastest grades available for the GTX 1080 and GTX 1060 were 10Gbps GDDR5X and 8Gbps GDDR5 respectively; however in the last year, 11Gbps GDDR5X and 9Gbps GDDR5 have become available. Now those faster memory grades are being made available to their partners for use in factory overclocked cards, giving partners more configuration options for their factory overclocked SKUs.
For partners, this marks their first real opportunity to sell cards with memory overclocks. While NVIDIA’s GPUs have been able to support these higher speeds, the stock configurations for the GTX 1080 and GTX 1060 were already pushing their respective RAM types to their limit, leaving partners no real headroom for the kind of stable and consistent overclocks required for factory overclocking.
At a hardware level, things are pretty straightforward for GTX 1080 cards; vendors can now grab Micron’s 11Gbps GDDR5X chips and use them in the place of 10Gbps chips.
