Along with this evening’s new of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, NVIDIA has a couple other product announcements of sorts. First off, starting tomorrow, the GeForce GTX 1080 is getting an official $100 price cut, bringing the card's price to $499. Since the card launched back in May at $599, prices for the card have held fairly steady around that MSRP. So once this price cut goes into effect, it will have a significant effect on card prices. Though it should be noted that the price here is the base price for vendor custom cards; the Founder's Edition card was not mentioned. If it maintains its $100 premium, then that card would be coming down to $599.

Update: The new prices for both the GTX 1080 FE and GTX 1070 FE have been published by NVIDIA. The GTX 1080 FE is getting a steeper-than-MSRP cut of $150, bringing it to $549 and reducing the FE premium to $50. Meanwhile the GTX 1070 FE is getting a $50 price cut, moving it to $399.

As for the second announcement of the evening, NVIDIA has announced that their partners are going to be selling GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1060 6GB cards with faster memory. Partners will now have the option to outfit these cards with 11Gbps GDDR5X and 9Gbps GDDR5 respectively, to be sold as factory overclocked cards.

To understand the change, let’s talk briefly about how board partners work. Depending on the partner, the parts, and the designs, partners can buy anything from just the GPU, to the GPU and RAM, up to a fully assembled board (the Founder’s Edition). With the release of faster GDDR5X and GDDR5 bins, NVIDIA is now giving their board partners an additional option to use these faster memories.

GeForce 10 Series Memory Clocks
  GTX 1080 GTX 1060
Official Memory Clock 10Gbps GDDR5X 8Gbps GDDR5
New "Overclock" Memory Clock 11Gbps GDDR5X 9Gbps GDDR5

To be clear, NVIDIA isn’t releasing a new formal SKU for either card. Nor are the cards' official specifications changing. However, if partners would like, they can now buy higher speed memory from NVIDIA for use in their cards. The resulting products will, in turn, be sold as factory overclocked cards, giving partners more configuration options for their factory overclocked SKUs.

As factory overclocking has always been done at the partner level, this doesn’t change the nature of the practice. Partners have, can, and will sell cards with factory overclocked GPUs and memory, with or without NVIDIA's help. However with NVIDIA’s official specs already driving the memory clocks so hard, there hasn’t been much headroom left for partners to play with; factory overclocked GTX 1080 cards don’t ship much above 10.2Gbps. So the introduction of faster memory finally opens up greater memory overclocking to the partners.

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  • samer1970 - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 - link

    This and the release of the GTX 1080 ti translates into :

    Nvidia is scared to death from the AMD VGA card ... and wants to sell their cards before its too late !
  • blackmagnum - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 - link

    You shouldn't choke your chickens before they are hatched.
  • Gasaraki88 - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 - link

    I can choke my chicken anytime I want! You can't tell me what to do!
  • tamalero - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 - link

    Well. Intel were indeed choking their chickens by doing price cuts and again pushing hidden emails to block AMD.
  • BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 - link

    I feel bad for all these chickens that are being choked.
  • garbagedisposal - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 - link

    You're delusional. AMD is getting rekt here.
  • vladx - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 - link

    ^This
  • jordanclock - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 - link

    Not really. This is the RAM they wanted from day 1 but couldn't get. The 1080ti launch is probably because they were waiting for the RAM before they launched. I highly doubt that Vega will be able to top the Titan or 1080ti. Probably the 1080, though.
  • Achaios - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 - link

    Not seeing any price cuts over here in Europe.

    https://www.amazon.de/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?__mk_de_D...

    Not only that, but almost every GTX 1080 brand from every manufacturer is currently almost sold out at Amazon.de, even the ultra-lame burning EVGA ACX 3.0 1080's. They simply don't have GTX 1080's in stock in anymore, and when there's no stock of a product it's pretty hard to see price cuts.

    Don't think we will even see price cuts here in Europe until perhaps much later into the year. Oh and, based on the prices in euros of the 1080's I see here, I am guessing that the cheaper 1080TI will cost around 899 euros.
  • Diji1 - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 - link

    No price cuts before the new stock is shipped to retailers, wow, the whole thing must be made up!

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