Zotac Unveils GeForce GTX 1080 for Mini Itx PCs
Zotac has unveiled an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 model designed for mini-itx PCs. The card has all the outputs of a reference model and the clock speed is slightly higher than the standard Nvidia designs.
The Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Mini has a length of 17 centimeters, which is roughly 10 centimeters less than the length of, for example, the Founders Edition of the same video card. The GTX 1080 Mini is made of a PCB newly designed by Zotac. The cooling also had to be redesigned and consists of two fans and at least three heat pipes. There is also a backplate available. The card has a power of 180 Watts, which requires a cooling system that is longer than the printed circuit board.
Under the hood, Zotac has not had to make any concessions to make the card smaller. The card has the same gp104 GPU found in other versions of the GTX 1080, complete with 2560 stream processors, 160 texture units and 64 rops. The full amount of RAM is also present: 8GB gddr5x. The GPU has a standard speed of 1620MHz and that increases to 1759MHz in boost mode. That’s a higher clock speed than Nvidia’s reference models. They have speeds of 1607 and 1733MHz respectively.
In terms of outputs, the card is the same as the reference models: three DisplayPort 1.4 connections, an HDMI 2.0b port and a dual-link DVI connection. Inside is a single connector for an eight-pin PCI-e plug.
According to Anandtech, Zotac will exhibit the card at the CES trade show in Las Vegas in early January. At this time, the company is not disclosing how much the card will cost and when exactly it will be available. Now it is only clear that the GTX 1080 Mini should be released sometime in 2017.
In the same breath, Zotac is also announcing an external docking station for graphics cards and a new mini PC. Of these two devices, the company only makes much less known. The docking station must connect to computers via Thunderbolt 3 and also has a PCI-e x16 slot, three USB 3.0 ports and a USB 3.0 port with Quick Charge. The mini PC has a Kaby Lake Core i7 and an Nvidia GeForce GPU on board. Those announcements come from, among others, Tom’s Hardware. This hardware must also be exhibited at CES.