Nvidia RTX 3080 Founders Edition Review

1. Introduction2. The Ampere Architecture3. RTX 3080 Founders Edition4. Testing Methodology5. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy6. 3DMark Port Royal7. Control8. Death Stranding9. The Division 210. Far Cry New Dawn11. Gears 512. Ghost Recon: Breakpoint13. Metro Exodus14. Middle Earth: Shadow of War15. Red Dead Redemption 216. Shadow of the Tomb Raider17. Total War Saga: Troy18. Performance Summary (11 Game Average)19. Cost Per Frame Analysis20. RTX On - Control21. RTX On - Metro Exodus22. RTX On - Shadow of the Tomb Raider23. DLSS On - Control & Death Stranding24. A Word on VRAM Usage25. Clock Speed26. Temperatures27. Acoustics28. Power Consumption29. Performance Per Watt Analysis30. Overclocking: Memory Scaling31. Closing Thoughts32. View All Pages

For our temperature testing, we measure the peak and steady state GPU core temperatures under load. This data comes from running the 3DMark Time Spy stress test for 30 minutes.

Thermal performance from the Founders Edition is very consistent. The GPU core steadily increased in temperature over the first five minutes, unit it hit 76C in our testing, where it plateaued for the remainder of the stress test.

This puts actual GPU temperatures pretty much in line with the 20-series Founders Editions, so the new design for the 30-series won't radically reduce temperatures to sub-60C levels.

However, we do have to bear in mind that the RTX 3080 has increased rated power draw over the RTX 2080 Ti by 28%, so to see the same sort of thermal performance (or better, when specifically comparing to the 2080 Ti) is highly impressive.

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