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GPUs and CPUs · Nvidia GeForce GTX

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080

11owners with an opinion
80%of verdicts positive
7/2positive/negative since 2024
9 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and reliability; criticized for support.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 9 years
I wouldn't worry about hardware. I've run the latest local models over the last year, including the recent Qwen 3.6 30B A3B, on a 9yo GTX 1080 and 32G RAM I have lying around[0]. If I can do that I don't think hardware will be a problem for you in the near term. The only updates I've needed were to Llama.cpp when a new class of model was released. [0]: In my case, I want to see how local models perform on limited hardware, sacrificing context size and intelligence compared to SOTA models, so I have to really limit my expectations.
Likes it
"Of course it can't do anything useful for the amount of power that it consumes" Until about the top-end of the 3000 RTX series released, the GTX 1080 was still king of raster performance. I'm playing modern games like Marvel Rivals at 1440p no problem. Risk of Rain 2 4k no problem. STALKER 2 1080p no problem. It even runs most of my VR games perfectly fine, with me only needing to switch to my RTX 5060 machine for Into the Radius 2. Even today, it is a very capable card, despite the power draw.
Likes it
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!
Likes it
Yes. I use https://heywillow.io/ and nothing ever leaves my LAN. It's entirely open, and relatively hackable - but also a pain to configure and requires 1 machine with a GPU (several years old is fine, I'm running mine on a nearly decade old Nvidia GTX 1080) and a couple satellite ESP32 devices (Espressif ESP32-S3-BOX-3). Home Assistant is also doing a more integrated version, but last I looked it was still "cloud-only" which defeats the purpose for me, since I was interested from a privacy standpoint. It does look like they finally released a local preview (at least for some languages) but I haven't yet tried them. By default, it still looks like they're using Google for TTS, which is a hard "NO!" from me. I've been pretty disappointed that they really seem to want to drive monetization with their voice features, and force people into the HA cloud services, but again - I haven't tried the latest release so take my frustrating with a grain of salt. They made a lot of noise in early 2023, and late last year still only supported cloud options... I was annoyed.
Doesn’t like it
3700X's 8-cores is a generational leap above the 7700k's quad core for modern games. They aren't comparable at all. I ran a GTX 1080 and then an RTX 3080. The performance was not very good in modern games designed for current gen consoles like pretty much any BR game for example. Some games got high FPS at times but with low minimum FPS.
Recommends it
The GTX 1080 is currently your best bet. It has the best price:performance ratio. The 1070 might also work, although it has slower cores and memory clock. I use a GTX 1080 for TensorFlow, it's ~100X faster than the CPU for training. I started with a 1060, which was way cheaper, but upgraded to the 1080 for more RAM and faster/more CUDA cores. If you can increase your budget and your motherboard supports it, you can get two 1080s, many things will parallelize across multiple cards. I know people who put 8 cards in a single machine and barely use the CPUs.
Likes itHasn’t owned it
Less energy usage, more vram, faster in games (see https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/gpu/compare?ids%... ). But it is even more about timing. Nvidia shifted to RTX afterwards, opting to go for raytracing and upscaling instead of making strictly faster cards. Which made the last GTX cards very competitive for regular usage, raising its status.