 1936 MHz boost clock in OC mode! A plus two super alloy power phase design! Auto extreme technology! GPU controlled fan headers! And, uh, or RGB lighting, I guess. TunnelBear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open internet. To try TunnelBear for free, check the link in the video description. So the Strix 1080 from ASUS is finally here, and it's rocking an all-new aesthetic cover to their beloved DirectCU3 cooler design. I think it looks great, and I appreciate that they opted to go with a flat black colouring essentially everywhere, which will, joking about RGB being an overdone feature aside, complement the addition of these great-looking Aura-enabled RGB LEDs that support many different lighting modes and can sync with other Aura-enabled devices like your ASUS motherboard, keyboard, mouse, etc. as well. For connectivity, ASUS decided to switch it up a bit. Instead of the 1080's standard setup of three display ports, one HDMI connector, and one DVI connector, ASUS opted to ditch one of those display ports for an additional HDMI connector. They call this solution VR-friendly HDMI ports, which might sound kinda like SLI-ready edition RAM, but it's not that bad. All it means is that you can have an HDMI-based VR headset connected and some other HDMI device like a monitor or TV without using a display port adapter for the flat panel display, something that's required with the HTC Vive on the 1000 series Nvidia cards due to their shockingly poor implementation of HDMI over a display port. That's it. Moving on, the Strix has a 203 MHz overclock in OC mode over the Founder's Edition 1733 MHz boost clock. This results in a freakishly awesome final clock speed of 1936 MHz, which hovers in real games between around 1920 to slightly over 2063 MHz, thanks to GPU boost. There is an elephant in the room here, however. The OC mode isn't enabled out of the box, and there's no hardware BIOS switch or anything to turn it on, a la the 6970 back in the day. It has to be enabled through GPU Tweak 2, an ASUS software utility. Problem number one, this utility isn't that easy to find. Searching for Download GPU Tweak 2 does yield an ASUS download page, but for a horribly out-of-date version of the software. No, if you want it, you'll need to scroll a little further to the Reddit discussion thread on how to find it. Now, they aren't hiding it either. There's a graphic about it on the box art, and honestly, it's not that hard to track down if you just go to your graphics card support page, select the Drivers button, expand what operating system you have, then expand the Utilities section. It's right there, no big deal. The confusing part is this. Why, if the tool is required to reach the performance levels advertised, are they not in your face about it? If this is what enables the card to be awesome, tell me. I mean, sure, in the manual, it says to install the Drivers disk, but like, come on. Linus basically made a meme out of throwing those things away back in 2009. So we have a driver disk, don't use this, download the latest off the NVIDIA website. They're inherently outdated, and ASUS is a pretty smart bunch. I'd imagine they know, as well as I do, that the majority of people ignore them and go straight to NVIDIA or AMD's website for the most up-to-date drivers. Why would they ever find themselves on the ASUS support page? It's annoying, too, because this problem is so simple to fix. MSI has an easy-to-find download page for Afterburner, so apparently it's not impossible. And a surprisingly low number of people are overclocking their cards anyways. So shouldn't you be just giving the performance to them that you're saying the card can do anyways, right out of the box? I mean, the card sits at 66 degrees under load, not a big deal, and you clearly have a BIOS that will run these speeds by default. There was that whole scandal where you were sending out cards preloaded with it to reviewers, so instead of taking that away from reviewers, FYI, our card was reflashed with a retail BIOS before testing, just give it to everyone. Problem solved. Maybe I'm missing something, but enough of that. Let's move on. The performance side of things was actually pretty groovy. I experienced performance improvements of about 3 to 7 FPS across the board, which is rather awesome. And that's while these games were running at 4K with everything maxed out beyond their maximum presets. That 3 to FPS was clawed for. These were in very difficult scenarios. If I turned all the settings down so that the average FPS number was higher, the FPS that it would have climbed would have also been higher. I expect many people to pick the highest possible performance preset and then crank further beyond that. This card is a beast and will serve you well. And all of that while sitting at about 66 degrees, and nice and quietly too. The card is a beast that doesn't get too hot and doesn't get too loud. That's cool. So it's a rockin' performer out of the box. Just don't expect it to overclock beyond the GPU tweak OC mode. I found this rather surprising. I mean, to be fair, I did manage to get the card stable at around plus 25 MHz, but we're talking like 1% here. For that level of increase, what's the point? I just turned it off. And to be fair, having the card hit 2063 MHz or 2 GHz was impressive enough. It's just a little surprising that there was no juice left in the tank. They really did seem to cut it close. You can either be frustrated by this or you can take that as a good thing. They did all the work for you. Let me know what your feelings are in the comment section down below. So in conclusion, despite my objections to the way it was advertised, this is an absolutely stunning card. It looks beautiful in so many ways. I love the swap to dual HDMI ports, and it is fast as hell. I might see some personal rig potential here, so stay tuned for that. Today we're highlighting the K7XX Limited Edition Ruby Red Headphones, which is unlike any of the colors that is currently on me. Of course, Massdrop still has a bunch of other cool products, which you can check out at the link in the video description. Hopefully you guys know about Massdrop already, though. It's the pretty simple concept where the more people buy something on Massdrop, a certain product, the lower the price of that certain product goes. The product we're showcasing today is the same spec-wise as the K7XX headphones that Linus reviewed last year. You can check out that video right up here. The only real difference is that it uses red accents on the earcups and headband, and that's about it, other than the fact that it is a Limited Edition drop. So if you want a pair, you're going to have to act pretty fast. So if you want to check them out and grab a pair of Ruby Red K7XX headphones, head over to the link in the video description today. Thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. It's awesome. And you're like, wow, all that stuff is weird, but it's a pretty cool graphics card regardless. Hit the like button, get subscribed, or check out the link in the video description to buy the stuff that we mentioned in this video, like the 1080 Strix at Amazon. And also linked in the description is our merch store where you can buy cool shirts and our community forum where you can talk about stuff like, brah, why don't they have that easier to set up or brah, I don't care. This card's really good and I do manual overclocking anyway, so I don't need that thing. I don't know. Check out this video to see like the normal GTX 1080. I filmed it in a little bit of a weird exotic area. So check that out.