Quote:Here are some of the first images of ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Mini, which could go down in history as the most compact GTX 1080 Ti graphics card (besides cards with factory-fitted water blocks, of course). The card features a PCB that's under 20 cm in length, mated to a 21.8 cm (8.3-inch) long cooler. What's more, the card isn't taller than ISA spec. It relies on an aluminium fin-stack cooler with a pair of 90 mm spinners, to stay cool. Such a diminutive heatsink size could mean that the card may lack idle fan-off. The card sticks to NVIDIA reference speeds, and draws power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Display outputs include three DisplayPort 1.4, and one each of HDMI 2.0b and dual-link DVI. The card could be formally launched at Computex 2017.

Quote:If you do have the room for a bigger card, we would always utilize this room. Especially considering the noise levels there are compromises you really would not like to see. Under load only the Nvidia Founders Edition produces more noise and in idle the presence of the Zotac is always noticeable. Nearly every other custom 1080 Ti is passive in that case, but this one is not.

Nevertheless we can definitely see the use case of the Zotac GTX 1080 Ti Mini: a compact game system under a new 4K-television, in order to play recent games smoothly at the native resolution. With the power of a GTX 1080 Ti this is a lot easier than with a GTX 1070. The Innovation Award is well deserved, but if you purchase it you will have to live with the negative sides of this little king.