Gigabyte has shown their GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming edition and MSI partnered with EK Waterblocks to make their new Sea Hawk EK X GeForce GTX 1080 custom AIB card.
While NVIDIA fans are still having trouble obtaining even the Founders Edition of the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 cards, the partner manufacturers are teasing fans with their watercooled custom GPUs. Both the Gigabyte GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming and the MSI Sea Hawk EK X GeForce GTX 1080 will run cooler and produce more overclocking results compared to their air counterparts.
Anyone can just by an EK Waterblock for their Founders Edition graphics card from NVIDIA. However, the average user may not want to go through all the hassle and risk of installing them on their own.
The new GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming edition card from Gigabyte is also claimed to reach up to 2.3GHz on manual overclocks, TweakTown has learned. Thanks to the 12+2 phase VRM, the card is able to reach more than the 2.1GHz maximum overclock that is being reported on most FE cards.
Even the 8GB GDDR5X memory clock is boosted from 10GHz up to 10.4GHz. The factory overclock for Gigabyte's watercooled card is 1936MHz which is already more than the FE's 1607MHz base clock.
MSI's Sea Hawk EK X GeForce GTX 1080 is made with the help of EK Waterblocks, The Tech Report reported. Unfortunately, the company did not release the factory overclock base frequencies yet but it is expected that it would be higher than the FEs.
Just like their GTX 1070 Sea Hawk EK X card, the 1080 version will still have three DisplayPort connectors, one HDMI and one Dual Link DVI-D port. The dimensions of the card is 278 x 165 x 20mm for those who are wondering if it will fit in their current tower cases.
Both the Gigabyte GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming and the MSI Sea Hawk EK X GeForce GTX 1080 card do not have prices and availability yet. NVIDIA's FE cards are even having problems with supply which jacked up the prices even more and PC gamers would be wise to just wait for a few weeks before the price stabilizes and all the custom non-FE AIB cards are released and in stock.