GeForce GTX 1080 8GB Founders Edition Release Date and News: NVidia Founders Edition graphic cards Debunked
What exactly is an Nvidia Founders Edition graphics card? When it announced its awesome new GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 cards, Nvidia noted that each would be offered in a Founders Edition, costing $100 and $70 more than their typical retail prices butnever explained what would be different about those variants of its new Pascal GPUs. Wherefore art thou more expensive, Pascal?
As it turns out, the Founders Edition (apostrophe frustratingly absent!) is Nvidia's new designation for the reference cards that it's been building for every new generation of chips. Think of it as equivalent to Google's Nexus line of Android smartphones. Typically, Nvidia only designs the graphics processing unit, memory architecture, and other basic elements of the graphics card, leaving the actual manufacture of the card and the particular cooling solution to its add-in board partners. The reference cards only show Nvidia's suggested overall design, and have generally been sold on a limited basis and without making any profit for Nvidia.
As Bennett now reports, the Founders Edition turns Nvidia's reference line into its own profit driver, tacking on the extra cost as essentially a profit margin for the GPU designer. The reason why anyone should actually want to spend extra is something Nvidia hadn't mentioned in its graphics card launches before this week: craftsmanship. Bennett sounds reasonably satisfied that Nvidia's promise of crafting the best possible GeForce GTX card, with the most reliable components and cooling, has substance underpinning it. Prior reference cards have been, he says, widely accepted as the best versions, so it makes sense for consumers that want extra peace of mind to spend more and obtain Nvidia's own production rather than a variant from Asus, MSI, Zotac, or any of the other board customizers.
Beyond the consumer aspect, Bennett also notes that PC vendors are also eager for such a Founders Edition, with Falcon Northwest chief Kelt Reeves having apparently lobbied for the present change. Reeves is said to appreciate the certainty of quality that comes with validating a card for use just once for its entire lifetime as a retail product. In other words, he doesn't like the fragmentation of having to deal with multiple suppliers of the same part, each of them employing different designs and adhering to different engineering standards.
