GTX 1080s: Testing a Legend

It's an older card running on high/ultra quality settings in those benchmarks. I would be more interested in low/medium settings.

1080 here with 7950X3D+96GB.

I still have one too in a home server to power a local AI model. That being said, even my 3090 is starting to show its age. Recent games require aggressive DLSS (performance or super performance) to maintain at usable 70-80fps at 4K. That being said, in practice the upscaling isn't very noticeable.

I'm still using a 1080ti in my main PC, though I don't play as many games as I used to. Control is the last title I picked up where I really felt like I was pushing the graphics capability of my rig.

I remember when I built my PC I was surprised when I'd come across a post of someone running ancient (at the time) chips like the i7-870, and now I'm realizing I am one of those people.

My 2700X and 1080ti do plenty of what I need these days. I meant to upgrade both a couple years ago but between job changes and then tariffs and whatnot it just never quite made sense to commit to the jump. I have a hard time imagining what an ideal upgrade would even be now with how expensive everything's gotten. I'm mostly hoping my machine continues to hold up for another couple years.

Funny enough, I have the 1080 and I tested qwen 3.5 9b on it today. I was positively surprised with the experience. It's no Opus but it did OK on the couple of queries and tasks I gave it. It's pretty impressive for a 10 year old gpu!

My old 1080 Ti now sits inside a 4U rackmount server. It's an EVGA SC2 HYBRID version and I am still amazed that the AIO cooler hasn't failed yet or leaked everywhere. One of the best things I've purchased in retrospect since it was my main GPU up until the middle of 2025, even though at the time in 2017 I felt the price of 1.5k NZD was extreme.

It's amazing how great the 10 series was. The 1060, a budget card, had the same amount of VRAM as the previous generations top tier card (6GB) with the 1080Ti having 11GB! the 5060 for example has only 8GB, the same as the GTX 1070 and 1080.

I have 3 3090s, all in various gaming computers. I’m not sure what to do with them- the VRAM is only 24GB so doesn’t seem worth the power costs to run an open weight model. Any suggestions on how I can run them as some type of cluster? Is it worth exploring NVLink?

My 1080ti is my local inference machine now. With the release of the Bonsai 27B models I can run a genuine dense model with usable context. GOAT card.

Those were great and 1070 was a great deal. Upgraded to a 3080 from 1070 last year, they are quite reasonably priced now.

1080 is a great card but the 1060 is an absolute king for its price back in the day, owned one and used it for quite a long time really. golden era of gaming and nvida

1080ti is a remarkably great card that landed at just the right time - by far my longest used card before I needed an upgrade

Haha that’s amazing. I thought these things were practically worthless. Gave mine away for free on Reddit.

Mine is still going strong, it can run Gemma 4 26b. It can still play all the games I care about at near max settings at 1440p at 60 FPS (like Elden Ring).#

My PC did coincidentally die today (not GPU related) so I think it's time for an upgrade, what do you recommend?

They still have great value in the used market. Swapped mine for a 3090, also used, for ~20% rebate.

I just threw together my old 1060 in a steamOS - adjacent box running cachyOS. It’s great for couch co-op platformers. The GPUs were overkill for most games then and can still run new indie 2d games now.

Crazy for me to still own two

I had a 1080 in my previous build, it was an OC model that went from 180 up to 250W and could perform about halfway between a stock 1080 and a 1080ti. That was a nice card but by late Covid it was really showing its age.

What's legendary about the 1080? It's a smaller 980ti on a much smaller node.