Gigabyte RTX 2080 Gaming OC 8G Review

1. Introduction2. Gigabyte RTX 2080 Gaming OC 8G3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark (1080p, 1440p, 4K)5. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (1080p, 1440p, 4K)6. Far Cry 5 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)7. Ghost Recon: Wildlands (1080p, 1440p, 4K)8. Middle Earth: Shadow of War (1080p, 1440p, 4K)9. Shadow of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 1440, 4K)10. Clock Speed11. Temperatures12. Acoustics13. Power Consumption14. Overclocking: 3DMark and Games15. Overclocking: Thermals, Acoustics, Power16. Closing Thoughts17. View All Pages

Nvidia's new RTX 2080 cards were officially launched on the 20th September, and today our attention turns to the first aftermarket card to come into our offices – the Gigabyte RTX 2080 Gaming OC 8G. This card features Gigabyte's Windforce 3X cooling system, overclocked speeds right out of the box, as well as RGB Fusion lighting. With a £110 price premium over Nvidia's Founders Edition model, however, can it justify the extra expense?

Following on from our review of the Nvidia RTX 2080 Founders Edition card, today we assess the Gigabyte RTX 2080 Gaming OC 8G. As the name suggests, it does come factory overclocked – out of the box it runs at 1815MHz, but it remains to be seen how big (if any) of a performance increase this gives us.

Gigabyte also puts a lot of emphasis on the triple-fan cooling configuration – named Windforce 3X – so it will be interesting to see how hot this card runs compared to Nvidia's Founders Edition, while acoustics will also be another area to focus on.

GPU	RTX 2080 Ti (FE)	GTX 1080 Ti (FE)	RTX 2080 (FE)	GTX 1080 (FE)
SMs	68	28	46	20
CUDA Cores	4352	3584	2944	2560
Tensor Cores	544	N/A	368	N/A
Tensor FLOPS	114	N/A	85	N/A
RT Cores	68	N/A	46	N/A
Texture Units	272	224	184	160
ROPs	88	88	64	64
Rays Cast	10 Giga Rays/sec	1.1 Giga Rays/sec	8 Giga Rays/sec	0.877 Giga Rays/sec
RTX Performance	87 Trillion RTX-OPS	11.3 Trillion RTX-OPS	60 Trillion RTX-OPS	8.9 Trillion RTX-OPS
GPU Boost Clock	1635 MHz	1582 MHz	1800 MHz	1733 MHz
Memory Clock	7000 MHz	5505 MHz	7000 MHz	5005 MHz
Total Video Memory	11GB GDDR6	11GB GDDR5X	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR5X
Memory Interface	352-bit	352-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	616 GB/sec	484 GB/sec	448 GB/sec	320 GB/sec
TDP	260W	250W	225W	180W

The Gigabyte RTX 2080 Gaming OC 8G shares all the same specs as the Founders Edition RTX 2080 – except one, which is boost clock. As mentioned, the Gigabyte card is clocked at 1815MHz out of the box, when Nvidia's reference speed is 1710MHz. That being said, the Founders Edition card runs at 1800MHz – so this Gigabyte is either +105MHz faster than reference speeds, or just +15MHz faster than the Founders Edition depending on how you look at it.

The supplied utility tool, named Aorus Engine, does allow users to enable the ‘OC Mode' which brings the boost clock up to 1830MHz – another 15MHz on top of the out of the box speed. Memory speed is left at 14000MHz. To show the card in its best light, this is the mode we did our testing in. 

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