TheOverclocker Issue 41 | Page 33

party application - perhaps even from competitors which are a little more feature rich than what AORUS has to offer. So finally, how does it perform? Well you can’t say you’re surprised by now. The card is definitely fast, in fact it’s undoubtedly one of the fastest. 4K gaming is a reality and you’re not going to run out of grunt anytime soon. There wasn’t a single game tested which could not be played at absolutely the highest detail level possible. In the games that proved particularly problematic, one simply lowers or disables anti- aliasing and your performance is back to normal. Should you need even more performance, you could of course overclock the graphics card. It won’t get you much as you’re going to end up at 1999MHz on the core during heavy graphical loads and perhaps 2050MHz under light loads. That isn’t enough to change how you perceive game performance, but if you overclock the memory, you may see some useful and meaningful gains. The graphics card has a fairly respectable memory overclock out the box, but you can go even further and increase it to 1520MHz~ or so without risking any stability (Works particularly well if you don’t adjust the GPU core clock at all). It will net you better gains at 4K with AA than increasing the core clock marginally does. Whatever you decide to do with the overclocking options if anything at all, the performance is plentiful and it does justify its price. A $60 premium isn’t much to ask perhaps. It’s difficult to dislike this graphics card. It has all the trappings that any other GTX 1080 Ti would have, which have nothing to do with AORUS but NVIDIA. However, in taking what NVIDIA gives and smoothing out all the rough edges of the Founders Edition, the AORUS XTREME does an admirable job and one that one cannot fault. This is a good if not fantastic gaming graphics card for gaming exclusively. For the asking price you’re not going to do better so you should definitely consider this if you’re in the market. TheOverclocker Summary As far as high end gaming graphics cards go, the AORUS Xtreme edition ticks all the obvious boxes. It’s as fast as any GTX 1080 Ti you’re going to find on the market. If you’re looking for something that is suitable for even liquid nitrogen cooling, then you’ll need to look at another graphics card as this is not built for that. For everything else, however, there’s absolutely no reason why this shouldn’t be your GTX 1080 Ti of choice. Would you buy it? The regular model most likely, failng that - YES. Issue 41 | 2017 The OverClocker 33