GPU

Just like with the CPU I knew that my biggest focus with this build was to make sure it would handle any games thrown at it now and over the next few years. The secondary focus was making sure the card would match the rest of the build. My wife plays a surprising amount of ultra demanding games so I needed to go a little over the top but given her gaming resolution of 1080p, I didn’t have to go with the top of the line. A GTX 1080 would do just fine and it just so happened the perfect card came in. Asus sent over the GTX 1080 11Gbps Strix card.

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After testing it I found that anything, even with settings completely cranked would be an issue at 1080p and it also ran cool. Given that the video card in my wifes PC is really the only part that gets regular updates I wanted something that ran cooler and quieter than a Founders Edition because I wouldn’t be including it in the water cooling loop. You can check out my full review but the Strix was solid in all of my testing. The noise wasn’t the best with the fans turned all the way up, but at normal speeds it was quiet and it was literally the coolest running card that I had tested at the time.

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As for aesthetics, I planned on having the card sitting vertical, facing out of the glass side of the Core P1 so the card did need to look good as well. It just so happened the Strix theming here does well with the Strix theme of our motherboard. In addition, Asus also including some lighting without going overboard with it. All in all, other than maybe going with the Strix GTX 1080 Ti I don’t think we could get a better card for this build. It is fast, cool, and quiet on the performance side and it is going to look great as well when lit up in RGB lighting that matches the theme.

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