It's been a little over a week since Nvidia lifted the lid on the company's latest set of GPUs, the RTX 3000 series. While we are getting closer to the day when reviews will go live, we are not quite there yet – but what we can show you is an unboxing of the RTX 3080 Founders Edition, along with a look at the new cooler design!
While we got a look at some renders of the RTX 3070, 3080 and 3090, it's always good to get a look at an actual card. It may be surprising to see how radically Nvidia has changed its cooler design versus the RTX 20-series, with the new 3080 Founders Edition sporting one fan on the underside, pushing air through the cooler and out by the I/O bracket, and another fan on the top side of the card pulling air through the heatsink and out into the top half of the chassis.
Nvidia knows how to make a good-looking graphics card, and that is exactly what we have here – it's a heavy and premium-feeling piece of kit, with the lovely unibody shroud contrasting nicely against the black backplate. We can also see the GeForce RTX logo visible on the right side of the front of the card.
The new 12-pin power connector is another thing to point out. It wasn't immediately clear from the leaks around this new connector, but it is significantly smaller than two standard 8-pin power plugs – the overall scale of the pins has been reduced. An adapter comes in the box with the Founders Edition, so if you don't have a modular 12-pin cable just yet, you can still use the card with 2×8-pins instead.
We can also get a look at those video outputs on the side of the card. 3x DisplayPort 1.4a connectors are on offer, as well as 1x HDMI 2.1, offering the full 48Gbps of bandwidth.
GeForce RTX 3090 | GeForce RTX 3080 | GeForce RTX 3070 | |
CUDA Cores | 10,496 | 8,704 | 5,888 |
VRAM | 24 GB GDDR6X | 10 GB GDDR6X | 8 GB GDDR6 |
Prices Starting At | $1499/£1399 | $699/£649 | $499/£469 |
Release Date | September 24 | September 17 | Available October |
KitGuru says: That's all we can show you for now, but stay tuned for our review coming very soon!