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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.
