It should be obvious why. Nvidia has posited that this same old tired reference cooler and PCB is suddenly deserving of a $100 premium now. So it's being put to the scrutiny of that price hike and failing to meet that premium miserably.
If not for the founders blunder, the card would have been much better received. They really screwed up the whole marketing,out of character for nvidia and they are reaping the bad PR of the mistake.
:thumbsup:
I think some people defending the FE cards clearly cannot separate GP104 from GTX1070/1080 FE video cards. I think GP104 is a great little GPU ASIC, but 1080 FE is an overpriced engineering failure that shouldn't be purchased by 98% of PC gamers or so. 1920 CC 1070 will beat a stock 980Ti while using at least 100W less power, have superior feature set and more VRAM. Another great little GPU that will need AIB cards to max its full potential. Once AIBs release cards that can reliably hit 2.2-2.3Ghz overclocks, the FE cards are dead in the water.
The issue here is that NV supporters cannot grasp that FE cards are too expensive for what they offer because AIBs will be the ones who will do GTX1070/1080 justice. It would be one thing to have FE priced at the lowest level, but to have $70/100 premiums while running hot, loud and failing to maintain advertised spec boost clocks after 20 minutes of gaming is an engineering failure. It's just ironic that the same people who trashed reference 6970/7970/R9 290/290X are not making excuses for a card that's failing even more since it has a premium $699 price. The excuses are pathetic from a gaming community that should be unified to want progress, better coolers, better price/performance, better engineering designs. The minute any decent AIB releases an after-market 1070/1080 that wipes the floor with the FE card for same $449/699 MSRP or lower, the FE is a worthless product catered to suck the money out of people who manage to buy $450-700 GPUs and shove them into outdated $100 cases.
Even the people making excuses that their small case cannot fit an open-air cooled card are just admitting in the open that they don't eve know hot to buy a good small case.
980Ti in a Raven RVZ02
People love making excuses for their favourite brand because it allows them to feel good inside after they have already determined that no matter what they'll buy the FE product. Far easier than accepting they don't know how to build PCs in any form factor where an AIB 1070/1080 will excel over FE card anyway.
I can almost guarantee it almost no one who is defending the FE 1080 card even owns a case as small as the Raven RZV02.
Even the
EVGA Hadron Air easily works with an open air cooled GTX780.
I see some "experienced" users stating that a 180-250W card dumping hot air into their case is a deal breaker as if they have scientific proof in hand that shows such a case/scenario overheating their CPU/GPU? No, instead we have real world scientific proof that a GTX1080 FE thermal throttles in a much larger Fractal Design R5. It feels like talking to PC users stuck 20 years ago trying to evade real facts. The only market left for blowers with reference PCB are:
1) water cooling (AIO or with block)
2) MiniATX SLI where you cannot fit 2-slot open-air cooled cards without chocking the top card
3) 3-4 way SLI (this no longer applies since NV canned official support for 3-4 way SLI)
Almost all the people online defending the FE blower do not fall into any of these 3 categories; but they will continue spouting "facts" that blowers have a place in the market without any proof of WHY.
In reality, if looking based on scientific testing, the market for blowers should be less 1-2% of the entire DIY population (categories 1-3 described above). In all other cases, an open-air cooled 1070/1080 with 6/8+8-pin connectors, superior VRM/Mosfets, 0 dBA idle operation will be superior in terms of noise levels, temperatures, and overclocking headroom.
Even in a Fractal Design R5, the great open-air cooled cards in SLI will still run cooler and quieter than 2 FE 1080 cards. With a good after-market heatsink for the CPU, the 450W of heat dumped in the case will easily be taken care of.
Even Linus has proven the Blower Myth to be true. In a small form factor PC case, the 980Ti blower chokes -- the exact conditions the blower was designed to excel in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbONfPkwa_s
Short of a full custom water loop,
the best combination of the benefits of a blower and an open-air cooled design are AIO CLC. The fact that a certain stubborn section of the PC community keeps defending the
Blower Myth in 2016 is an insult to the PC Enthusiast community. Unfortunately the PC gamers before me ruined it by repeating
this lie for decades and now it's taking another 1-2 decades to reverse their lies and reveal the truth that blowers were never superior for 98% of PC gamers. What's mind-blowing is that in light of real world tests that prove that blowers are outdated technology for most PC gamers, they are still being defended and with a $70-100 premium too. It's insanity that after you apply "aluminum shroud" lipstick to inferior tech, it's suddenly premium.
It's only going to get worse for a 250W TDP GP102 card. It's going to require > 50 dBA operation to ensure that a 230-250W TDP 1080Ti doesn't thermal throttle, while the best AIB 1080Ti cards will manage sub-30 dBA with
higher GPU boost clocks.