Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Mini Review - Review 2022

The PC manufacture as a whole tends to push hardware in two disparate directions at the same time. Showtime, it scrambles for faster and better functioning. And then, it tries to jam all that muscle into smaller and smaller spaces. Zotac'southward GeForce GTX 1080 Mini ($530), the video carte du jour that's the focus of this review, falls into the latter group.

We've seen this trend recently in the workstation market with HP's tiny, Xeon-powered HP Z2 Mini G3 ($986.68 at HP) , likewise as in the consumer-gaming realm in 2022 with MSI'due south impressively engineered (if rather expensive) MSI Vortex G65 ( at Amazon) cylindrical mini-belfry, a fiddling monster PC that we tested with 2 video cards inside. Only the DIY-enthusiast/PC-building oversupply has long been at the forefront of meshing pocket-sized and powerful in the PC space, with Mini-ITX motherboards and cases, gumstick-sized M.2 SSDs, and scrunched-down SFX power supplies.

Zotac's GeForce GTX 1080 Mini is an intriguing contempo footstep in that tiny-merely-mighty direction. It still sports a cooler that's two slots broad, every bit near all cards in this class practise. Just at eight.3 inches long, it's more than ii inches shorter than the similarly performing Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition ($549.00 at NVIDIA) , and a whole lot smaller than most other GeForce GTX 1080-based alternatives, too. It represents a pregnant jump in performance from what's been possible from meaty video cards we've tested in the past, such every bit the Asus GeForce GTX 970 DirectCU Mini and the potent-but-aging AMD Radeon R9 Nano ($495.00 at Amazon) .

If yous're looking for a powerful card to drop in a small PC case for high-end gaming, the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Mini represents the pinnacle of what'due south possible today. Just know that you'll pay a bit of a premium for its stubby stature. At this mid-April 2022 writing, it was selling online for nearly $530, while you lot can find some larger GeForce GTX 1080 cards for nether $500. And while information technology is compact for what information technology is, it's over eight inches long, and thus won't fit in the smallest Mini-ITX cases. And then double-check your case's specs and clearances earlier buying.

The Basics: A Look at the Specs

We've looked at GeForce GTX 1080-based cards before, in the form of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition, likewise equally cards with third-party coolers like the MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming 10 8G and Zotac's own, much larger GeForce GTX 1080 Amp Extreme. In terms of internal silicon and specs, not much separates those larger cards from the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Mini. It runs on the same GP104 chip equally other GTX 1080 cards, and information technology's even clocked slightly college than the Founders Edition bill of fare. Nvidia's version has a top Boost Clock of 1,733MHz, while Zotac says the GTX 1080 Mini can clock as high equally ane,759MHz out of the box. That's a very modest 1.v percent jump, but it'due south however dainty to see it from a carte du jour that's so much smaller than most of its same-GPU kin.

Of course, the GeForce GTX 1080 is no longer Nvidia's top-end gaming card. Information technology relinquished that title recently to the higher-end GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. But the GTX 1080, whether you're talking virtually the Mini version or whatsoever other, is however one powerful card that'south capable of just about anything you're likely to desire to do with it, save maybe gaming at 4K at the highest settings at 60fps. For that, you'll accept to step up to the college-terminate GTX 1080 Ti or possibly wait for one of AMD's forthcoming "Vega" cards.

Rather than rattle off a full list of specs for the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Mini, here's a summary, direct from Zotac'south product page.

If you lot'd like more details on what exactly makes the GeForce GTX 1080 GPU tick, we'll point you lot to our initial review of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition, rather than rehash them here. Otherwise, let'southward forge ahead and take a expect at what sets this compact Zotac card apart from its full-size blood brother.

Connections and Design

At 8.iii inches long and just nether 5 inches top to bottom, the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Mini is by no means "pocket-sized," in a general sense. Many low-end video cards come in smaller, as a rule. Just compared to the x.5-inch-long GTX 1080 Founders Edition menu (shown compared to the GTX 1080 Mini in the image below) or Zotac'south own abominable Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Amp Extreme (which is 12.eight inches long and very thick), the Zotac GTX 1080 Mini is definitely petite. It'due south certainly compact for its class.

That said, seeing as the dimensions of Mini-ITX motherboards are 6.seven inches on each side, this card, past necessity, will overhang any such motherboard at the bill of fare's trailing border. As a result, some very compact PC cases meant for Mini-ITX won't be big plenty for the Zotac GTX 1080 Mini. Cards like the AMD Radeon R9 Nano and Asus GeForce GTX 970 DirectCU Mini we mentioned earlier, while they aren't equally powerful, are smaller, and will fit improve in those extremely tight cases. So be sure the case you have (or are considering) has enough clearance to handle this menu. It is a little on the large size for a compact pixel-pusher.

Like the Founders Edition card, the GTX 1080 Mini requires a unmarried viii-pivot PCI Limited power connector, and Zotac includes a six-pivot-to-eight-pin adapter in the box. The connector is too like shooting fish in a barrel to access, located right on the back edge of the card.

Port selection on the carte is standard, with three DisplayPort 1.four connectors, a solitary HDMI ii.0b port wedged between them, and a dual-link DVI port below (or higher up, depending on your motherboard orientation) for legacy monitors.

This certainly isn't a flashy graphics card. Merely Zotac does include a metal backplate, which is nice if your case has a window. And information technology may help the card misemploy heat in the cramped environment of a Mini-ITX chassis.

As for the grey cooler and two fans (one of which is slightly smaller than the other), they're rather plain-looking, simply we personally don't mind that at all.

They also aren't overly bulky, which is of import if yous're building within a compact case. And while you should await some increased fan dissonance with this meaty version of the GTX 1080 (and all compact, high-powered cards in general) compared to a larger version of the same card, we didn't notice the card existence peculiarly noisy when testing information technology in our absolutely roomy mid-tower exam bed. You'll but desire to brand certain the compact case you might put this card in has plenty active ventilation to exhaust the heat generated by this carte du jour. That'due south because the GTX 1080 Mini'south open up-air design won't push button warm air out the back like the Founders Edition's through-flowing, "blower"-style menu is designed to.

With all that out of the fashion, there'south piffling else to talk about with this card, other than performance. We'll become to that in detail now, but if you want a quick summary, y'all tin can expect the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Mini to perform pretty much similar a standard GeForce GTX 1080 card, requite or take.

Equally we've mentioned in our other recent card reviews, things are in flux these days when it comes to testing graphics cards, because two key technologies—despite being available in some grade for over a yr now—are proving difficult to examination definitively.

The start of these is DirectX 12 (DX12), which is simply now starting to become common in AAA titles, though there are however relatively few real-world benchmarks for it. Still, DX12 volition likely be the standard graphics API in the future, and this menu was designed to concluding for a few years or more. So it's important to know if a card tin handle DX12 well before buying. We tested the Zotac GeForce GTX Mini with the newest DX12-capable games we had on hand, including Hitman (the 2022 edition) and Ascension of the Tomb Raider, likewise as Futuremark's DX12 benchmark, 3DMark Time Spy. Nosotros tested a load of games using DirectX 11, likewise, considering that API will all the same be in broad apply for at least another yr, and probably much longer.

The second technology that'south a little tricky to exam, at present, is support for virtual reality, or VR for short. At this writing, there are ii major competing VR headsets, the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, with more coming to market place presently, and it's difficult to establish a lonely test that is applicable to all VR scenarios. At the moment, we're using Futuremark's new VRMark test to measure VR capability. Information technology consists of an "Orange Room" examination designed to mensurate a carte du jour'south ability to handle today's games, and a "Bluish Room" examination for extremely demanding time to come titles. The Bluish Room exam is and so tough, no card we've tested to date (including the $699 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti) gets a passing grade in information technology. And then, for the moment, we'll simply report Orange Room results. At the moment, baseline VR back up for those headsets starts with the AMD Radeon RX 480, or that card's merely-launched successors, the Radeon RX 580 and Radeon RX 570, and, on the Nvidia side of things, with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060. Since the GTX 1080 is significantly more powerful than those cards, it should have no problems handling VR titles for years to come up.

And so, on to the benchmarks. Unsurprisingly, the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Mini lands slightly ahead of the Founders Edition version of this carte when gaming at 1080p. Given the fact that Zotac overclocks the bill of fare slightly out of the box, that'south pretty much what we expected.

To requite you a sense of where the GTX 1080 lands in terms of the newer, pricier cards that are bachelor, we've charted information technology beneath against the higher-end GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition, too as the 2022 Nvidia Titan X. Note that the Titan in our charts is not the brand-new Nvidia Titan Xp menu that the visitor launched in April 2022, but the previous version, which arrived in the center of 2022. We also should note that we didn't have the Titan Ten on hand to retest. Because of that, the results beneath for that card are based on the testing nosotros did in early December 2022. The other cards in our charts were retested more than recently, and and then take the advantage of whatever functioning gains Nvidia has been able to achieve in 2022 cheers to driver updates.

At this writing, AMD doesn't have any cards that approach the performance of the GTX 1080, save for cards similar the Radeon R9 Fury 10. Just that carte and its other Fury counterparts (including the Radeon R9 Nano) are now pushing 2 years old and condign difficult to find. Follow-upward high-end cards from AMD, built around a new "Vega" compages, are expected to make it very soon, according to the latest projections from AMD as we wrote this. The company has promised they will make it in the second quarter of 2022.

3DMark Burn Strike Ultra

Nosotros started off our testing with Futuremark's 2022 version of 3DMark, specifically the suite'southward Fire Strike Ultra subtest. Fire Strike is a synthetic test designed to measure overall gaming performance. Ultra is meant to simulate the stresses of game graphics rendering at 4K.

On this outset exam, we saw the Zotac Mini outperform the Founders Edition GTX 1080 very slightly—by merely under 2 percent. The two college-finish cards are clearly in another league, and were nigh 30 pct faster here. Simply you definitely aren't going to skid a GTX 1080 Ti or a Titan Ten into a small, skinny desktop—at least until Zotac or another menu seller figures out how to brand a 1080 Ti Mini card. We're waiting.

Tomb Raider (2013)

Let'southward start our game testing with some older games. Hither, we fired up the 2022 reboot of the classic title Tomb Raider, testing at the highest detail preset ("Ultimate") and 3 resolutions.

The Zotac GTX 1080 Mini managed to tack on 3 frames per 2nd (fps) compared to the Founders Edition GTX 1080 here. And once again, the 2 higher-end cards were significantly speedier.

Sleeping Dogs

Next, we rolled out the very demanding real-world gaming benchmark test built into the older title Sleeping Dogs…

The same trend continued here, with the Zotac Mini card edging ahead of the standard GTX 1080 at lower resolutions.

Hitman: Absolution

Next up was Hitman: Absolution, which is an crumbling game but all the same plenty hard on a video card.

The results were narrower here, but the tendency continued, disregarding the Titan X, which for some reason we could not diagnose at the fourth dimension had some frame-charge per unit limitation problems hither at 1080p in this game.

Far Cry Primal

Side by side, we moved to a more contempo game, released in 2022. Ubisoft'due south latest open-world first-person hunting game is i of the nearly enervating titles nosotros use, thanks to its lush leafage, detailed shadows, and otherwise incredible environments.

We saw a mirror of the previous results here, and a continuation of the Zotac bill of fare doing slightly meliorate than the Founders Edition GTX 1080 at 1,920x1,080 resolution. In a higher place 1080p, both GTX 1080 cards were consistently pretty evenly matched. Once more, the Titan X had an artificial ceiling at 1080p that nosotros could non resolve at the time.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Lara Croft rises once again in the early 2022 iteration of Square Enix's long-running activity franchise. As our hero works to unfold an ancient mystery (and reveal the undercover to immortality) alee of the ancient and deadly Order of Trinity, she traipses through a slew of circuitous atmospheric environments, from arid tombs to the frigid Siberian wilderness. A dynamic weather system, and the complexities of Lara'southward current of air-tousled hair, add to the game's visual complexity.

The Zotac card did even better hither. Information technology managed to tack on a couple of extra frames per 2d even at ii,560x1,440. And, once once more, the Titan X lagged behind at 1080p.

Hitman (2016)

The newest game in the Hitman franchise finds Amanuensis 47 turning over a new foliage, and embarking on a journeying of self-discovery as a instructor at a school for underprivileged children. Just kidding, of course; he kills loads of people in this ane, just like the remainder. Information technology does offer gorgeous graphics in both DX11 and DX12 varieties, though. We tested DX12 hither.

It appears that this game is a piddling CPU-limited at 1080p, as the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition didn't do a whole lot better than the GTX 1080 cards hither at that resolution. Only the Zotac GTX 1080 Mini still did nearly 6fps better than its bigger Founders Edition counterpart. (Nosotros tested all these cards on our legacy video-card test-bed PC, for comparability; it's based on a Core i7-4770K CPU, which may exist showing its age here in this, likely the most enervating of our game tests. We've since moved our video-card testing to a exam bed using a "Kaby Lake" Core i7-7700K CPU.)

3DMark Time Spy DX12

This is the offset 3DMark test using DirectX 12, so it should theoretically show how cards stack up using this fledgling API. According to the developers, "With its pure DirectX 12 engine, built from the ground upwardly to support new features similar asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, Time Spy is an platonic benchmark for testing the DirectX 12 functioning of the latest graphics cards." The Graphics Subscore tries to isolate the GPU, while the Overall Score factors in the rest of the PC.

This test was the first time the Founders Edition GTX 1080 card managed to border alee of the Zotac GTX 1080 Mini. But the divergence (in the Graphics Subscore) was less than half a percentage, well inside our standard 2 percent margin of error.

From the makers of 3DMark comes its outset VR benchmark; for those who may want to try this at domicile, no headset is required to run it. VR has extremely high hardware requirements, so this examination is designed to show overall capability for VR. As we mentioned earlier, we'll study here only the Orangish Room subtest.

For just the 2d time, in this concluding test, we saw the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Mini state behind the Founders Edition GTX 1080. This fourth dimension, the percentage difference was a tad above 2 per centum. But all of these cards are so far above the baseline functioning level for VR (which, on the Nvidia side, is the GeForce GTX 1060 for this generation of "Pascal" cards), that a 2 percent difference, even if information technology isn't deemed for past natural testing variation, is effectively meaningless. All of these cards volition handle today's VR games with relative ease.

A Powerful Meaty Graphics Card

Considering that it'south significantly shorter than a GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition, and it actually costs nigh $10 less than the Nvidia-branded card while pushing out marginally meliorate performance at 1080p, there's petty non to similar well-nigh the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Mini.

If you have a meaty PC case that won't fit a larger carte and are looking for something that tin deliver this level of performance, nosotros know of no other card that comes close. That said, if yous don't quite demand this much muscle, you lot can notice similarly sized (and even smaller) versions of the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1060. In fact, nosotros looked at the Zotac GeForce GTX 1060 Mini recently, as well.

Our simply reservations well-nigh the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Mini is that information technology'due south not quite modest enough to fit in some extremely compact Mini-ITX cases. The Lian Li PC-Q01B, for instance, simply accepts graphics cards that are up to 6.vii inches long. Only such cases are extreme in their tininess, and plenty of similarly modest alternatives accept a petty more space forepart-to-back to accommodate this viii.iii-inch menu. Just be sure the chassis you own (or are considering ownership) has room for the Mini earlier getting your heart assault this card in that case.

Also, if you lot don't demand a GTX 1080 carte this pocket-size, at that place'south no major reason to pay the premium for the GTX 1080 Mini versus some other, cheaper GTX 1080 card. Larger, non-Founders Edition versions of the GeForce GTX 1080 are readily available for under $500. This Mini may be mighty, but if y'all don't need it to be mini, y'all can go the same level of performance from bigger cards that are a little cheaper.

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Further Reading

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Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/graphics-cards/16399/zotac-geforce-gtx-1080-mini-review

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