ASUS GeForce RTX 3080

Mit der Asus GeForce RTX 3080 ROG Strix Gaming OC gibt es eine der schnellsten RTX 3080 Grafikkarten, ohne dabei den kühlen Kopf zu verlieren. Die ausgeklügelte Kühleinheit überzeugt und mit der dezenten RGB-Beleuchtung bekommt auch das Auge etwas geboten.

Nvidia’s RTX 3080 proved itself as a real powerhouse easily eclipsing our previous generation RTX 2080 Ti by well over 20% in most tests (higher resolutions). Simply put, the card is great for 1080/240 Hz, 1440/144 Hz, or 4K/60 gaming using Ultra settings. The great thing about Ampere cards is the price.

Reviewing partner products is always a difficult proposition, especially in these modern times when so much of the meat of the package is kept within the chip and thus can't really be changed. Motherboards definitely suffer from this, and graphics cards certainly have the majority of their performance locked into the design with only the extra bits - roughly cooler and lighting - able to be adjusted. Whilst this can be great for consumers because you can purchase anything and be sure you're getting within the ballpark, it can be difficult for the manufacturers themselves to make their products stand out, and indeed it forces them to be super aggressive with their pricing knowing that their base model isn't all that removed from their top model. With the ASUS ROG RTX 3080 OC Strix there is an extra pressure upon ASUS because the Strix range is such a monumental hit. It perfectly matches the needs of 95% of users, and drizzles the main event with just enough extras to have some pizazz without ramping the price through the roof. The X570 Crosshair VIII Formula is well over twice the price of the X570 Strix-E but only has a few bits for the hardcore and all that most people desire/need. In graphics card terms the Strix range has flown off the shelves with a blinding cooler, some RGB lighting and a nice boost to performance. With this new Ampere version ASUS have gone back to the drawing board and totally redesigned their cooler. The fan design has been greatly altered with more blades per fan on the outer two, whilst the middle fan is reaching the limit of the number of blades you can have in a fan whilst still having spaces between each of them. Beneath those outer fans there are spaces to help direct the air over the generously finned heatsink, whilst the central fan has all its pressure directed over the GPU itself. In other words, exactly how we want it to be. The redesign has seen a big aesthetic change though. Whilst we agree the original Strix cooler design was getting a bit long in the tooth, we're not entirely sure that stripping all the RGB lighting off the fan surrounds and replacing the all-black design with a more girder-based look is the best way forwards. Additionally the sheer length of the card - over 12 inches long - and size of the triple slot cooler has meant that ASUS have dispensed with their RGB connectors that were found on the inside end of the PCB on the previous designs. Maybe their software phoned home with the data that nobody used it, or maybe it's a deep cut. We can live without it more than we can live without the "grown up" lack of glitzy lighting we've come to expect from a ROG Strix product. The fan headers are still there in the back plate vent but you'd probably never notice unless you were looking for them and we don't really like the idea of dangling fan cables out from that far inboard on the card, Asus can design better than this.... Where the Strix OC scores big points is where it really counts. The RTX 3080 has already dominated our charts and blown our minds, and if we did such pointless things as a price per FPS comparison it would rule the world as a God-Emporer. One of the biggest features is also, curiously, tucked away. The PCB has two settings via a switch and our testing showed that both Performance and Quiet modes give roughly the same FPS for roughly the same temperature and noise. If you delve a little deeper and download the ASUS software there is a third mode, OC, that pushes the card as hard as it can go and makes full use of it's 21 power phases and 3 (three!) 8pin PCIe power inputs to drag the Strix RTX 3080 dangerously close in performance to the RTX 3090 in all but the most extreme high resolution tests. Yes it's louder in this mode but insanely powerful too. Whilst looks may be subjective, and you clearly need to measure your case to make sure that the 30cm length will squeeze in, the undeniable truth about the ASUS RTX 3080 OC Strix is that it is the fastest RTX 3080 we've tested so far, and very nearly beats out the RTX 3090 in some tests. Just remember to download the GPU Tweak II software to unlock its full potential.

Nvidia bietet mit der Ampere-basierten RTX 3080 einen deutlich größeren Leistungssprung als noch beim letzten Generationswechsel von Pascal zu Turing. Das Custom-Modell von Asus beeindruckt mit einer hochwertigen Verarbeitung und einer effektiven sowie leisen Kühlung – das Gesamtpaket stimmt.

Viele Monate nach dem Start der Geforce RTX 3080 ist die Verfügbarkeit weiter angespannt. In PCGH 03/2021 haben wir trotzdem verschiedene Designs verglichen, damit Sie beim richtigen Modell zugreifen - wenn die Zeit kommt. Eine der getesteten Karten ist die Asus TUF Gaming O10G Geforce RTX 3080.

Wer noch mit Karten der 1000er Serie unterwegs ist, sollte dringend über ein Update nachdenken. Wenn es ein Modell der RTX 3080 sein soll, ist man mit der ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 3080 OC Series dank der hochwertigen Komponenten und Verarbeitung sicherlich gut beraten.

Eigentlich sollte uns die ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 OC schon deutlich früher erreichen, aber aus verschiedenen Gründen hat sie es zum Start nicht zu uns geschafft. Es deutet sich inzwischen an, dass dieses Modell mit zu den besten gehören könnte, welches neben den "Einsteiger-Karten" ab 699 Euro zu einem vernünftigen Preis zu haben ist. Es ist also Zeit für uns diese Mutmaßungen zu untersuchen.

Mit Asus GeForce RTX 3080 TUF und MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio stellen sich die ersten Custom-Designs der Founders Edition im Test. Ihr Vorteil gegenüber Nvidias Variante ist der leisere Betrieb, bei der Leistung tut sich hingegen wenig. Die klassischen 3-Lüfter-Kühlsysteme verlangen allerdings nach Platz.

Asus has done an excellent job with the TUF Gaming RTX 3080 OC, it’s a great quality graphics card and better than Nvidia’s own Founders Edition in every measurable way. It’s quieter, significantly cooler, faster out of the box and best of all, it doesn’t require a silly 12-pin power adapter or specialized cable.

You receive a product that will be dominant in that Ultra HD space. Your games average out anywhere from 60 to 100+ FPS, well aside from Flight Simulator 2020. Dropping down in resolutions does create other challenges; you'll be far less GPU bound, but then again, we do not expect you to purchase a GeForce RTX 3080 and play games in 1920x1080. Arbitrarily speaking, starting at a monitor 2560x1440 resolution, that's the domain where the GeForce RTX 3080 will start to shine. The raw shading/rasterizer (read a normal rendered game) performance is staggering as this many shader cores really make a difference. The new generational architecture tweaks for Raytracing and Tensor also is significant. Coming from the RTX 2080, the RTX 3080 exhibited a roughly 85% performance increase, and that is going to bring hybrid raytracing towards higher resolutions. DXR will still remain to be massively demanding of course, but when you can plat Battlefield V iN ultra HD with Raytracing and DLSS enabled at over 70 FPS, hey, I'm cool with that. Also, CUDA compute performance in Blender and V-Ray, OMG! Where is the extra performance coming from you might wonder? Well, the turbo frequency remains more or less the same. The memory runs reference 19 Gbps. The slightly increased gaming clock isn't going change things either; these days it is all about how much power a GU is allowed to consume. ASUS applied an increased power limitation (5%), e.g. it may consume more energy in return for extra performance. That combined brings in the extra 3~4% compared to reference performance. Performance-wise the TUF Gaming will be a tiny notch faster compared to reference thanks to the slightly higher memory clock. It overclocked quite a bit more productive as well (compared to the founder). IT all will remain marginal for all AIB cards that we'll test, though. The performance for all cards we expect will be close to each other. That leaves design, cooling, and preference. Well, that a dual 8-pin power header. We cannot complain as to what this card brings to the table in terms of raw power, so in the end, it will be user choice, pricing, and brand interest that will set the base for your purchasing decision. I cannot help thinking though that the STRIX at a reasonable price would be the product to get. But we'll have to check that one out at a later stage.

Any time we use the word simple, or utilitarian, or anything along those lines, there's a tendency to read it in a pejorative manner. We definitely don't mean it that way with the ASUS RTX Strix TUF. There is a lot to be said for a product which follows the Ronseal ethos of doing precisely what it says on the tin. It's a meat and potatoes type graphics card, and that's nothing to get snooty about. For many people, cards like this are, even with the massive price cut Nvidia has implemented relative to its performance, right at the peak of their budget. If you can save a few quid by eschewing frippery but still get excellent cooling and gaming performance, then we're all in on that idea. The ASUS RTX 3080 OC TUF falls into the category of hardware which brings you all the performance, with no cooling compromises either, and yet doesn't bust the budget to achieve that. If this particular OC model is a tiny bit out of reach, then the vanilla one is forty quid cheaper and is the one we would suggest buying. Much like the conclusion you read earlier this week for the Nvidia Founders Edition the same applies to the ASUS RTX 3080 OC TUF. The performance is attention-grabbing, but that's all down to the 3080 core. No matter what we threw at it, the average frames per second were tremendous. This was true with every scenario, every game. You have to get into the insane realms of 8K Gears 5 to drag things down, even remotely, and given how it was only the RTX 2080 Ti that first made 4K 60FPS playable at high detail settings, it shows how obscenely powerful the Ampere range of cards is. Special credit has to go to Nvidia's reworked DLSS 2.0 AI upscaling solution, which not only makes the image look better in many scenarios but dramatically increases the frame rates too. It's a win-win scenario, and as anyone who has been involved in the hardware world - or just the world in general - will know, those things in combination are rarer than a politician with integrity. As for the ASUS itself, there is a reason that the TUF cards sell so well. That price, for a manufacturer card, is excellent and as you can see from our temperature graph, those three fans work beautifully, keeping the card cool even after the most tortuous test we can devise. Remember too that we run our graphics cards in a sealed case rather than an open testbed, so your results will be very similar. If you're not running the lunacy of an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X as your CPU, you might even have lower temperatures. The clock speeds bear this excellent thermal performance out too, boosting far beyond the clock speed ASUS list our OC model as having. Indeed we'd be tempted to save the forty quid and go with the regular model, because the Nvidia GPU Boost works so well, and clearly the cooler can handle some serious horsepower. The TUF is a well priced RTX 3080, but we think in reality the £649 card would be a better option and then just hit the Nvidia OC scanner button and get that performance for free.

GeForce RTX 3080 serves the needs of the gamer who wants lusty framerates at QHD and smooth gameplay at UHD with all the bells and whistles turned on, and it currently has no performance peer at the $699/£649 price point. Though eminently fast, Nvidia's decision to crank TDP to 320W brings challenges and opportunities in equal measure. The Founders Edition card sets a new bar for aesthetics and does well in thermals and acoustics, putting renewed pressure on add-in card partners to do more with limited scope for improvement. Asus duly takes on that challenge with the Strix and TUF cards. The TUF Gaming OC's enlarged form factor and 2.7-slot cooling deals easily with the board's elevated 340W TDP, offering superb temperatures and low-noise operation that's better than the FE on both fronts. Build quality is top-notch, the aesthetic restrained, and there's little to complain about once you realise that Asus doesn't go overboard with the price. At £689, the extra 75MHz out-the-box boost speed offers a frame or two extra in most titles, but there's not a whole heap extra silicon headroom to go faster still. Thoroughly reasonable on the value front for a mid-OC effort, we'd actually veer away from this model and choose the non-OC version that is identical in every way apart from the relatively small overclock, saving yourself £40 for investment in a triple-A title or two. Bottom line: the Asus GeForce RTX 3080 TUF Gaming OC is a Founders Edition-beating card without the usual overly steep price premium.

ASUS expects their RTX 3080 TUF Gaming OC to retail for $730, which is just a 4% cost increase—very reasonable. You get a much better cooler in return, and a small overclock out of the box, which alone can't justify the pricing though. I'd still buy the TUF, because I have plenty of space in my case for a triple-slot card, and low noise is very important to me. Adjustable RGB lighting might be the feature that will lure in others to prefer the card over the Founders Edition, which has just fixed white lighting. On the other hand, the clean understated looks of the Founders Edition will appeal to many, and it also comes at highly competitive pricing. You feel like the OC isn't big enough for you to justify the cost, but still want the TUF cooler? No problem, the TUF is also available without "OC", using the same PCB and cooler, for NVIDIA MSRP of $699. TUF Gaming is finally TUF.

asus geforce rtx 3080 10g noctua edition news logoMit der GeForce RTX 3070 Noctua OC Edition (Test) gingen ASUS und Noctua eine Zusammenarbeit ein, die zu überzeugen wusste. Die erste Karte war allerdings eher als Testballon zu verstehen, denn eigentlich ist die Kühlung in der Lage, auf deutlich leistungsstärkeren Karten eingesetzt zu werden. Heute schauen wir uns mit der ASUS GeForce RTX 3080 Noctua OC Edition das zweite Ergebnis dieser Zusammenarbeit an und sind gespannt, ob die Ergebnisse ebenfalls so positiv ausfallen, wie beim kleineren Modell.

Asus hat sich nach der GeForce RTX 3070 Noctua Editon erneut mit dem österreichischen Kühlerspezialisten Noctua zusammengetan und die im Herbst 2021 fast sehnlicher erwartete GeForce RTX 3080 Noctua OC Edition umgesetzt. Auch dieses Modell deklassiert im Test die versammelte Konkurrenz.

High-end graphics cards adhere to a tried-and-true formula; think the STRIX series, which has been a consistent success with very few alterations. Choosing a vendor these days is based on aesthetics, cooling performance, and, in 2022, availability. Most cards perform similarly and with that in mind, I'm beginning to appreciate what ASUS attempted with the Noctua Edition RTX 3080; it's something fresh, a different approach, and we dig it. It truly is one of the quietest high-end graphics cards on the market, however, it comes at the expense of a big 4-slot form factor and two high-quality yet brown/beige colored fans. In its default setup, the end result is a nearly silent product. Because of the incredibly low noise levels, this product can be slightly more expensive. Nauseating prices ... when released back in 2020, the 3080 Founder edition carried an MSRP of 699 USD. Then came the clusterfrack that is mining and COVID. Prices went up. The same FE card now costs 1000 USD/EUR. The Noctua card as tested sits at roughly 1100 USD/EUR, which is a huge no-go zone. The acoustic and temperature performance are both excellent; the appearance, while minor, does not detract from the performance. Overall, from an audiophile standpoint, the device has a lot of advantages. However, there are several luxury items on the market that perform similarly in terms of acoustics and appearance. Perhaps in the future, in addition to the DUAL, TUF, and STRIX lines, we'll see cards based on an ASUS Noctua line, targeted to individuals who require exceptionally low noise operation. And this is where we should stop. The release of the Noctua 3080 is an interesting card for the general public, if you're lucky, you'll be able to find one in retail. Recommended for individuals looking for truly silent operation. The price tag for a high-end graphics card however is outside the realm of realistic parameters.

Although it is probably reductive to use the kind of generalisations that are found more often in politics than the real world, for our purposes you'll excuse us if we resort to binary options. There are two types of people who purchase graphics cards. There are those who want the maximum performance at all costs. It could have a similar noise level to an Airbus A380 and the kind of temperatures usually reserved for the aforementioned politicians once they're sent to where they belong in the afterlife. Then there are those who want a card which provides an amount of performance typical of the architecture, and does so without leaving them deaf in one ear.

With four slots, the GeForce RTX 3080 Noctua is easily one of the biggest cards that I've ever tested. This is a total non-issue though, unless you're building a SFF PC. The vast majority of desktop cases will fit this card without problem, as ASUS made sure to keep height and length at reasonable levels which making the most out of four slots for thickness. Part of the reason why the card is so thick is that full-size retail Noctua fans are used, which take up more space than the usual fans installed on graphics cards. Averaged over our 25-game strong test suite, at 4K resolution, we find the RTX 3080 Noctua 2% ahead of the NVIDIA RTX 3080 reference design. While any gains are welcome, I feel like a bit more would have been nicer. Compared to Radeon RX 6800 XT, the ASUS RTX 3080 is 4% faster, the Radeon RX 6900 XT is 3% faster than the RTX 3080. NVIDIA's RTX 3090 is 11% faster and much more expensive. Both GPU vendors recently refreshed their lineups, the Radeon RX 6950 XT is 10% faster than the ASUS Noctua card and the RTX 3090 Ti is 21% ahead.

NVIDIA released the GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB very silently in January. At their CES event there was no mention of the card, and it suddenly appeared on the market on January 12th. I had samples of the ASUS STRIX OC and the MSI Suprim X, but NVIDIA didn't provide a driver before launch—rather they waited until after launch to post their drivers. At this point I was already on ski holiday, and had to take care of other new releases since then, that's why you're getting this review only today. The ASUS STRIX RTX 3080 12 GB today, the MSI RTX 3080 Suprim X next week.

We've got two high end RTX 3080 12GB models for review today, and both of them are so similar that we could almost say the same thing about both. Perhaps the thing we think the most about the revised RTX 3080 isn't anything to do with either ASUS or MSI, but instead is to do with Nvidia themselves and where this card fits in the market. Forgive us, then, for using largely the same text in both our conclusions. We'll deal with the individual card near the end.

Well there’s not much point beating around the bush is there, it’s the fastest card we’ve ever tested. Which isn’t too shabby considering the previous fastest record was only set yesterday! OK, it’s not the top model from the new RTX 3000 series, but it still has enough power to topple the mighty Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti, which we already know is a LOT faster than the RTX 2080. From generation to generation, Nvidia is showing solid gains, and ASUS has done well to work their own magic on the card too.

The Nvidia RTX 3080 was a spectacular card at launch, bringing 2080Ti beating performance to the market at nothing like the investment the flagship Turing card required. To borrow a phrase from Enobarbus, "age doth not wither nor custom stale..." although in this case it's the impressiveness of the RTX 3080, rather than Cleopatra's infinite variety. We still think it is right in the sweet spot of the Nvidia range and the ASUS Strix itself is one of the best of the breed. Here, in the White Edition, it's as excellent as it was when we saw it in black. The only difference between the two cards is, rather obviously, the white aesthetic. We've been around long enough to remember when white coatings and plastics on PC parts quickly yellowed, and similarly we can remember the ASUS Z97 TUF Sabranco which was the first product to truly use a bright white plastic that remained bright and white no matter how long you owned it. It was a total game changer. Admittedly back then there wasn't a whole lot of products available surrounding it. The history of the famous "beige box" was still too fresh in people's minds and most manufacturers were still all aboard the black train. Thanks to Jonathan Ive white became the absolute in-colour and PC components took a big leap in that direction to the point that you can, and we have, build systems entirely white themed. You haven't got the same level of choice as you might have if you choose to go down the black route, but when the white products available to you are as excellent as the ASUS ROG Strix RTX 3080 White Edition we don't think that lack of choice is a negative. Most people buy a Strix anyway. There is only a single element of the design we're not that keen on, and it's that ASUS have stuck to using an RGB bar on the side of the card and no RGB on the front fan shroud. When you mount it as we have in our test system that's fine, but if you want to follow the current trends and go for a vertical mounting then you have to be very careful about your lighting choice as the colour 'bleeds' through to the top of the fans. If you built an OC3D based colour scheme that means red lighting and all that happens is the top of your fans end up looking pink. It's a minor point but something of which to be aware. However, if you have been itching to get your hands on a new GPU and want one that will perfectly fit your arctic aesthetic then the ASUS ROG Strix RTX 3080 OC White Edition is the perfect card with its bright coating, excellent performance and low temperatures and wins our OC3D Extreme Aesthetics award because well......... It looks amazing!