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Since the launch of Nvidia's GTX 1080 Ti back in February, we have seen plenty of aftermarket cards from the likes of ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte to name just three. Today we analyse the Zotac GTX 1080 Ti Mini, most notable for its diminutive size. In fact, the Mini is actually the smallest GTX 1080 Ti on the market right now – so how does its size affect its performance?
If you have been reading our graphics cards reviews for the last few months, you will have noticed a certain trend among many of the aftermarket GTX 1080 Ti cards – they are all big. I don't just mean big in terms of length – though many are approaching 30cm long – but also in terms of height. To demonstrate this, just look at the ASUS ROG Strix, MSI Lighting and Gigabyte Aorus models – all three are two-and-a-half slot cards, something which has definitely become the standard for third party GTX 1080 Ti cooling solutions.
With that in mind, it becomes quite apparent what the Zotac GTX 1080 Ti Mini is up against. Not only is the Mini ‘just' a 2-slot card, it is also incredibly short at 211mm, and this obviously limits the amount of space for its heatsink and fans. Cooling performance will thus be interesting to assess, particularly when compared to Nvidia's reference GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition.
That being said, Zotac has still added +38MHz to the boost clock so, in theory at least, performance should be marginally better than a standard GTX 1080 Ti FE. For full clock speed comparison, check out this table below:
| GPU | Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition | Zotac GTX 1080 Ti Mini |
| Base Clock |
1480 MHz | 1506 MHz |
| GPU Boost Clock | 1582 MHz | 1620 MHz |
| Memory Clock Effective |
11008MHz | 11010MHz |
| Memory Bandwidth | 484 GB/s | 484 GB/s |
| Price (£) | £689 | £699 |
Zotac is well known for its yellow products and boxes, and the GTX 1080 Ti Mini box is no different.
Inside, accessories are scarce: there is a black booklet containing warranty and quick-start information, as well as two 2x 6-pin to 8-pin power adapters.
Now, moving onto the card itself, the GTX 1080 Ti Mini (or just the ‘Mini' from here on) is an attractive piece of kit, but it is obviously very small. The full dimensions are as follows: 211mm x 125mm x 41mm. Clearly, this 1080 Ti should fit in just about any case on the market.
The shroud is made from a gunmetal grey plastic, and this colour is consistent throughout. It is not a black card, but the grey is certainly colour-neutral enough for it not to cause issues with the rest of your system should you have a particular colour scheme going on.
Elsewhere, the keen-eyed amongst you may well have noticed that the card's two fans are not only different sizes, they also use different fan blade designs. The fan on the left (when seen from above) is 90mm and uses swept fan blades, while the fan on the right is 100mm in size and uses much straighter, flatter fan blades.
Zotac has not told me why they have done this, but my guess is that the different fans are each designed to give slightly different air pressure levels to aid cooling of the GPU core, VRMs and memory chips as well as potentially reduce air turbulence.
Speaking of cooling, on one side of the Mini we get a look at four copper heatpipes, all 6mm thick, while a single heatpipes is visible from the other side. That gives a total of 5x6mm copper heatpipes. The pipes themselves aren't plated either, so the raw copper look may not be for everyone, but you won't see the heatpipes once the card is installed anyway.
Prising the cooler from the PCB (done by simply removing 6 screws from the backplate) gives a better look at the heatpipe layout and the copper contact area. It also becomes fairly obvious that the heatsink is not large – far from it. The heatsink fins are quite densely stacked, but the card is simply too short to allow for a more sophisticated cooling solution. We look at thermals, acoustics and power consumption later in the review.
Moving on, the Mini sports a Zotac logo on its outer edge and this logo is illuminated by white-only LEDs. Interestingly enough, Zotac deliberately eschewed RGB lighting to try and keep the card as small as possible – having a RGB-illuminated logo would require an RGB controller on the card, something Zotac says would've required a longer PCB.
The card's backplate is also very tasteful, with a two-tone look that retains the card's colour-neutrality without being boring and plain. This is certainly an improvement over Zotac's previous backplate designs – like the GTX 1080 Amp Extreme, for instance – which often featured bright yellow accents. Those designs may look good on their own, but they suit very few systems. The Mini, however, would not be out of place in any rig.
Elsewhere, the Mini sports dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and Zotac rates the card's power consumption at 250W.
Lastly, the display connectors are worth noting: 3 x DisplayPort 1.4 , HDMI 2.0b and DL-DVI-D. The latter is obviously something Zotac decided was worth including as Nvidia ditched the DVI connector on its Founders Edition cards, but it is back here.Our newest GPU test procedure has been built with the intention of benchmarking high-end graphics cards. We test at 1920×1080 (1080p), 2560×1440 (1440p), and 3840×2160 (4K UHD) resolutions.
We try to test using the DX12 API if titles offer support. This gives us an interpretation into the graphics card performance hierarchy in the present time and the near future, when DX12 becomes more prevalent. After all, graphics cards of this expense may stay in a gamer’s system for a number of product generations/years before being upgraded.
Note: We tested the RX Vega64 and Vega56 using the ‘Turbo‘ power mode in AMD’s WattMan software. This prioritises all-out performance over power efficiency, noise output, and lower thermals.
General Test System Notes
- AMD Graphics cards were benchmarked with the AMD Crimson ReLive 17.9.1 driver.
- Nvidia Graphics cards were benchmarked with the Nvidia 384.94 driver.
Test System
| CPU |
Intel Core i7-7700K ‘Kaby Lake’ (Retail)
Overclocked to 4.8GHz Core |
| Motherboard |
ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming
|
| Memory |
Geil Evo X
16GB (2x8GB) @ 3200MHz 16-16-16-36 |
| Graphics Card |
Varies
|
| System Drive |
Sandisk SSD PLUS 120GB
|
| Games Drive | Crucial M4 512GB |
| Chassis | Game Max Moonstone (high fan speed) |
| CPU Cooler |
Fractal Design Celsius S24
|
| Power Supply |
Seasonic Prime 1000W Platinum
|
| Operating System |
Windows 10 Professional with Creators’ Update (64-bit)
|
Our test system consists of an overclocked Core i7-7700K processor and 16GB of 3200MHz Geil DDR4. High-end hardware is used to eliminate CPU and memory from the bottleneck equation and put the performance onus solely on the GPU being tested.
Comparison Graphics Cards List
AMD Radeon RX Vega64 Air (1247MHz core / 1546MHz Average Boost / 1.89Gbps HBM2 memory)
AMD Radeon RX Vega56 Air (1156MHz core / 1471MHz Average Boost / 1.6Gbps HBM2 memory)
Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti Reference (1480MHz core / 1582MHz Boost / 11Gbps GDDR5X memory)
Gigabyte GTX 1080 G1 Gaming (1696MHz core/ 1835MHz Boost / 10Gbps GDDR5X memory)
Nvidia GTX 1070 Founders Edition (1506MHz core/ 1683MHz boost / 8Gbps GDDR5 memory)
Software and Games List
- 3DMark Fire Strike & Fire Strike Ultra (DX11 Synthetic)
- 3DMark Time Spy (DX12 Synthetic)
- Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation (DX12)
- Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (DX12)
- Ghost Recon Wildlands (DX11)
- Grand Theft Auto V (DX11)
- Rise of the Tomb Raider (DX12)
3DMark Fire Strike is a showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for today’s high-performance gaming PCs. It is our [FutureMark’s] most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.
Early indicators are good for the Zotac Mini as it pulls ahead in all three 3DMark synthetic tests. This would be due to the small +38MHz factory overclock which means the Mini edges out Nvidia's reference design.Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation is a real-time strategy game set in the future where descendants of humans (called Post- Humans) and a powerful artificial intelligence (called the Substrate) fight a war for control of a resource known as Turinium.
Players will engage in massive-scale land/air battles by commanding entire armies of their own design. Each game takes place on one area of a planet, with each player starting with a home base (known as a Nexus) and a single construction unit.
We opt for the Extreme quality profile and run the GPU-Focused test using the DX12 game mode.
Ashes deviates from the trend we saw across our 3DMark testing – as at both 1440p and 4K, the Zotac Mini card falls behind Nvidia's Founders Edition (FE) card. Analysis of the GPU clock speeds show that this was because the Mini card was unable to maintain its frequency advantage over the Founders Edition due to thermal limitations. In short, the Zotac Mini got hot, so Nvidia's GPU Boost 3.0 tech reined in its core speed – thus causing the Mini to fall behind Nvidia's 1080 Ti FE.Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is set in the year 2029, two years after the events of Human Revolution and the “Aug Incident”—an event in which mechanically augmented humans became uncontrollable and lethally violent.
Unbeknownst to the public, the affected augmented received implanted technology designed to control them by the shadowy Illuminati, which is abused by a rogue member of the group to discredit augmentations completely. (Wikipedia).
The Very High preset was used for 1080P, 1440P, and 4K. We used the DirectX 12 API.
As with Ashes, the Zotac Mini falls behind Nvidia's 1080 Ti FE – this time at every resolution tested. The margins are by no means big, with the widest gap being just just under 3 frames per second, but it is interesting nonetheless given one would think Zotac's card, with its factory overclock, would be the faster 1080 Ti.
Evidently, there is more to the story than just factory clock speeds.Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands is an open world tactical shooter video game developed by Ubisoft Paris. It is the tenth instalment in the Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon franchise and is the first Ghost Recon game to feature an open world environment.
We run the built-in benchmark using the Very High quality preset at 1080P, 1440P, and 4K.
Zotac's GTX 1080 Ti Mini just about edges the Nvidia FE card at 1080p and 1440p resolutions, though it falls behind by less than 1 FPS once the resolution is bumped up to 4K. Incidentally, the gap between both 1080 Tis is not much more than a single frame per second across all three resolutions, so there really is not much between the two cards.Grand Theft Auto V is an action-adventure game played from either a first-person or third-person view. Players complete missions—linear scenarios with set objectives—to progress through the story. Outside of missions, players may freely roam the open world.
Composed of the San Andreas open countryside area and the fictional city of Los Santos, the world is much larger in area than earlier entries in the series. It may be fully explored after the game’s beginning without restriction, although story progress unlocks more gameplay content.
We use the Ultra quality settings (or the highest alternative – generally Very High or High – when Ultra is unavailable). MSAA is set to 2x for 1080p and 1440p and is disabled for 4K. The Advanced Graphics options are all set to their maximum levels.
Coming to the ever popular GTA V, here the Zotac Mini comes out top across all three resolutions for the simple reason that, during GTA V benchmarking, it held its boost clock consistently higher than the Nvidia's FE card. The frame rates themselves are also very strong, even at 4K.Rise of the Tomb Raider is a third-person action-adventure game that features similar gameplay found in 2013’s Tomb Raider. Players control Lara Croft through various environments, battling enemies, and completing puzzle platforming sections, while using improvised weapons and gadgets in order to progress through the story.
It uses a Direct X 12 capable engine.
At 1080p and 1440p, we use the Very High quality preset and 2x SSAA. At 4K we use SMAA. The DirectX 12 API is used. Numbers are taken from the benchmark’s Geothermal Valley test.
Now testing Rise of the Tomb Raider, we see more ‘toing and froing' between the two GTX 1080 Ti's – the Mini is fastest at 1080p, falls just short at 1440p, but comes back to edge Nvidia's FE card at 4K. There really is not much to separate these cards at all.We first measure system-wide power draw from the wall while the card is sat idling at the Windows 10 desktop for 5 minutes. Gaming power draw is recorded by running the Deus Ex benchmark at 4K. As a maximum stress test, Fire Strike Ultra Stress Test is run 5 consecutive times and the cards’ power draws are recorded.
Note: due to some logistics issues, we are unable to present data for the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 cards in this test.
Compared with Nvidia's reference design boards, the Zotac Mini only draws around 10-15W more, despite the card using two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, instead of 1x 8-pin and 1x 6-pin. This small bump to the power consumption must be due to the +38MHz factory overclock.
In any case, if you are a looking for a GTX 1080 Ti, an extra 15-or-so Watts is not going to scare you off.We first measure GPU temperature while the card is sat idling at the Windows 10 desktop for 5 minutes. Gaming GPU temperature is recorded by running the Deus Ex benchmark at 4K. As a maximum stress test, Fire Strike Ultra Stress Test is run 5 consecutive times and the cards’ GPU temperature levels are recorded.
Ambient room temperature was held at around 23°C.
Note: due to some logistics issues, we are unable to present data for the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 cards in this test.
Not surprisingly, the Zotac Mini runs rather hot – 84C is actually the default thermal limit, and within a just few minutes of gaming the card will hit that limit and stay there. This causes GPU Boost 3.0 to lower the chip's core frequency over time, hence why we saw Nvidia's Founders Edition card out-performing the Mini in some titles.
The card's backplate and shroud remain quite cool, however, with a hotspot of 57C on the rear of the card. There are a couple of capacitors on the side of the card, just above the Zotac logo, and these reached up to 66C during our stress test – but that is still well within thermal limits.We take our noise level measurements with the decibel meter on the top and middle section of the case, overhanging the side panel (power supply side, not motherboard tray side) by exactly 1 inch to avoid any airflow pressure coming from the exhausting AIO cooler.
I measured the sound floor to be 34 dBA, thus anything above this level can be attributed to the graphics cards. The power supply is passive for the entire power output range we tested all graphics cards in, while all CPU and system fans were disabled.
Noise levels were measured after 5 minutes under three scenarios: desktop idle, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided at 4K, and the Fire Strike Ultra stress test.
Note: due to some logistics issues, we are unable to present data for the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 cards in this test.
In truth, none of the four cards tested above are quiet cards. The Zotac Mini may not be louder than either of the new AMD Vega cards, but it is still not the most pleasant thing to listen to. Given that it is an aftermarket card, yet it is still louder than Nvidia's Founders Edition, probably tells you everything you need to know about the GTX 1080 Ti Mini.
I don't want to be too harsh here, as cramming such a powerful GPU into such a small physical design was always going to result in compromises. However, the Zotac Mini is particularly audible when idling – its fans would not spin below 45%, or around 1400 rpm, even when sat on the desktop for 15 minutes with 0% load on the card. Suffice to say, if you are looking for a quiet GTX 1080 Ti, you would be best served by one of the much larger partner cards.
My best overclocking results came with +100MHz added to the core, +250MHz to the memory, with power and temperature sliders at their maximum levels.
When running Fire Strike, this overclock helped the card hit a peak frequency of 1923MHz, though it only took a couple of minutes to settle at around 1835MHz. The card did run very hot, however, as the core temperature continued to rise until it again hit the new thermal ceiling of 90C. Noise levels were almost unbearable, too.
Still, this overclock did bring some tangible gains – as demonstrated above. An average 5% performance increase is not to be sniffed at.
That being said, it is my opinion that the extra heat and noise are really not worth it. I would suggest a GTX 1080 Ti is fast enough already, and considering the size limitations of the Zotac Mini, leaving the card in an overclocked state may not be the best idea.Zotac has certainly pulled off quite the feat of engineering with its GTX 1080 Ti Mini. The world's smallest GTX 1080 Ti, the Mini measures just 211mm long and is likely to fit in almost any case on the market right now.
It is a good-looking card, too, with a neutral gunmetal grey shroud and backplate. Given Zotac has a history of incorporating yellow accents into its card designs – something which certainly splits opinion – it is good to see the company opt for a card design that will work with almost any colour scheme.
When we come to performance, my testing suggests there is not much between the Mini and Nvidia's Founders Edition card. Looking over the data, the Mini might edge ahead in one test, only for the Founders Edition card to retake the lead in the next.
This is despite the Zotac Mini boasting a +38MHz factory overclock when compared with reference speeds. In practice, this overclock did not make much difference as the Zotac Mini quickly reached its thermal limit of 84C, resulting in GPU Boost 3.0 lowering its core frequency – to the point where the Founders Edition card actually ran around 40MHz faster throughout our testing.
Still, a GTX 1080 Ti is a GTX 1080 Ti – factory overclock or not, the GP102 chip is very capable and we still saw excellent frame rates from the Zotac Mini. The trade off comes, as I alluded to, when we get to thermal and noise levels.
Essentially, the Zotac card will run at whatever thermal ceiling you set – all the way up to 90C. This also means the fans are constantly spinning at quite a pace, and that means the Mini is audible at all times. It is also particularly noticeable when idling, as I did not see the fan speed drop below 45% (1400 rpm) – even with 0% load on the card.
In sum, the Zotac GTX 1080 Ti Mini is an impressive card – to take such a powerful GPU and put it into such a small package, successfully, is certainly worthy of praise. The thermal and noise concerns are certainly significant, but it really depends on your use case as to whether or not you should buy this card. Those looking for a GTX 1080 Ti for their mid-tower can forget it, but if you really want something tiny – maybe for a HTPC or ITX LAN rig – then the Zotac Mini is well worth a shout.
You can buy one from Overclockers UK for £698.99 HERE.
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Pros
- Very small.
- Neutral colour scheme.
- GTX 1080 Ti is still fast – even if GPU Boost causes the core frequency to slow down over time.
- Actually one of the cheaper aftermarket GTX 1080 Ti cards.
Cons
- It will run at its thermal limit, even up to 90C.
- Fans emit a fair bit of noise.
KitGuru says: Overall, the Zotac GTX 1080 Ti is an impressive card. Its limitations are not worth it if you just want something for your standard mid-tower – but for those looking for a lot of power in a tiny package, it has proved to be well worth buying.
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