Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti Review

22

Nvidia’s 3080 Ti is built upon their second-generation RTX architecture and utilizes lightning-fast GDDR6X memory. It outshone RX 6800 XT’s performance in most games while even surpassing it in others.

Nvidia also reduced VRAM memory usage and prices in response to an ongoing GPU shortage that’s been plaguing the market for months, creating more consumer-oriented cards with these changes.

Power Consumption

Nvidia’s flagship RTX 3080Ti graphics card is one of the premier cards for 4K gaming, constructed on Ampere architecture with numerous CUDA cores and VRAM. Furthermore, its advanced features, such as Ray Tracing and DLSS, make it even more capable than its predecessors.

The RTX 3080Ti consumes around 350 watts under full load, which is significantly more than its predecessor, but it still performs admirably under this workload. Furthermore, its cooling design efficiently dissipates this heat.

However, if you plan on using an RTX 3080Ti for 4K gaming, a high-quality power supply unit (PSU) is necessary to meet its power demands and prevent overheating or instability issues in your system. A 750W PSU should suffice, although having some extra headroom may prove beneficial should you ever require upgrades or other components requiring more power in the future.

Reputable brands of power supply units will offer superior cooling and power usage than lower-quality brands, helping prevent GPU overheating while prolonging its lifespan. Furthermore, such brands will likely provide extensive warranties and customer support.

Nvidia has taken steps to enhance the security of their GPUs by restricting the Ethereum mining hash rate on the new RTX 3080 Ti. This will prevent scalpers from taking advantage of the high demand for this model and exploiting it.

The RTX 3080Ti graphics card is an affordable yet powerful graphics solution that delivers a fantastic gaming experience at an unbeatably reasonable cost. Boasting an outstanding framerate and supporting all types of ray tracing games, its high number of CUDA cores and additional memory makes it more potent than its predecessor RTX 2080 Ti. Additionally, its broad support for various video formats makes it suitable for numerous applications.

Noise Levels

This card boasts an outstanding thermal solution with six heat pipes and three fans to maintain low GPU and memory temperatures, even under full load. Furthermore, its dual BIOS allows users to choose between performance or quiet modes, with the former prioritizing lower GPU/memory temperatures while the latter prioritizing reduced noise levels.

The EVGA RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Ultra has a highly efficient cooler that helps it use less power than its competitors while maintaining similar low GPU and memory temperatures as other models of this card. This is thanks to having a higher CPU clock speed; although this may help improve cooling performance, it could compromise overall gaming performance as the GPU will operate at lower boost frequencies.

Zotac’s RTX 3080 Ti Phantom GS model takes an interesting approach with its triple-slot and fan design, utilizing six heat pipes to maintain temperatures of approximately 78 degrees C. Furthermore, this card boasts an audible noise level of 42 dB, which is not annoyingly loud; unfortunately, however, it consumes more power than competitors such as MSI’s 12GB Suprim X (360W during gaming) or EVGA RTX 3080 Ti (340 W during gaming) but unfortunately.

NVIDIA’s latest RTX 3080 Ti is an impressive upgrade over its predecessors. It offers significant graphics performance gains while remaining ideal for high-resolution gaming at 4K resolutions, supporting real-time ray tracing and improving AI features. Furthermore, Ampere Streaming Multiprocessors provide double FP32 throughput for enhanced efficiency as well as second-generation RT cores that offer concurrent ray tracing and shading functionality at an unprecedented level of performance; its GDDR6X RAM offers up to 128GB/s throughput, thus making this GPU an excellent choice among any gamer looking for high performance.

Cooling

Nvidia’s new gaming flagship, the RTX 3080 Ti, is an absolute beast. It can handle games almost as quickly as its high-end sibling, RTX 3090 while providing enough VRAM to support gaming at 4K resolution without breaking the bank. Unfortunately, one-month post-launch, this card remains hard to come by; supply has been severely limited, and consumers must either deal with scalpers or enter store lotteries in order to purchase one of the few cards on sale.

Nvidia has not drastically altered the design of the RTX 3080 Ti from its predecessor. This card still features Nvidia’s excellent blower cooling system that draws away heat from GPU and memory, running calm and quiet with only occasional fan noise being audible.

Nvidia’s Founders Edition card does have its limitations. Its single fan isn’t as effective at dispersing heat away from the card and can often be louder than its rivals. Furthermore, using its custom power adapter requires two 8-pin leads from your PSU, which could prove challenging if using custom cables.

ZOTAC’s GTX RTX 3080 Ti Trinity OC liquid cooler provides exceptional cooling and performance, drawing its coolant from a 240mm radiator before pushing it over an all-in-one cold plate placed directly atop the GPU die and GDDR6X memory modules. Furthermore, two 120mm fans feature addressable RGB lighting to maintain quiet operation while dissipating heat effectively.

ASUS’ ROG Strix LC GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is an excellent option for those seeking a new graphics card, boasting an all-in-one liquid cooler equipped with a 240mm radiator that connects directly to 540mm tubes on the card itself and two 120mm fans that have been optimized to reduce noise levels, drawing coolant from an all-coverage, high-performance radiator that sits atop GPU die, memory and power supply – it will remove approximately 550W under load so 750W is required as a power source

Performance

Nvidia’s RTX 3080 Ti is an upgrade on every front over its vanilla counterpart, from increased power and cooler operation to running games at higher resolution without suffering a substantial hit to frame rate, and finally, its innovative DLSS upscaling technology, which boosts performance when supported games render at a lower resolution and run at higher FPS; making triple-digit frame rates possible more often than you’d imagine!

Nvidia’s RTX 3080 Ti is designed around its new Ampere architecture, boasting 10,240 CUDA cores, 320 Tensor Cores, 112 ROPs, and 80 Raytracing Acceleration Cores, along with G6X memory for superfast performance. In order to deter cryptocurrency miners, Lite Hash Rate technology was added, which limits Ethereum mining performance on this card in an attempt to restrict cryptocurrency mining performance on that particular card.

Like its Nvidia predecessors, the RTX 3080 Ti delivers on its promised RTX experience with a significant performance increase and numerous added features that create an exceptional gaming platform. These features include Nvidia Reflex API for latency-reducing esports games; AI-powered tools from Nvidia Broadcast to assist streamers and video producers; Nvidia Encoder (NVEnc), as well as Nvidia’s excellent NVEnc encoder; these add up to create an unrivaled gaming platform experience!

Our tests of the RTX 3080 Ti compared it favorably to AMD’s new RX 6900 XT in several games, as it delivered 60 FPS or above in most, with one exception being Assassin‘s Creed Valhalla and Control, where its performance was around 20% slower.

However, Nvidia hasn’t provided any details regarding their efforts to manage GPU supply or guarantee actual humans can buy one anytime soon – leaving third-party sellers as an outlet to fill this card’s gap – leaving many users uncertain whether or not to risk buying it themselves.