The RTX 3080 from Nvidia this is the most powerful GPU I've ever had in the studio it's also the most exciting graphics card I've ever put into a system it is awesome now I spent the greater part of the past week just playing a ton of games on this thing.
I want to go through the user experience talk about some things that you should be aware of if you're interested in picking this thing up and let's just get in now the design elements of this thing this GPU looks very different from anything else. Nvidia's put out before the 10 series I thought always looked like a ninja turtles. I loved the way those things looked and I think most people did at the time the 20 series was less appealing to me it's simpler design but this year the 30 series looks awesome but this year the fins are what define the design aesthetic of this thing it's such a nice design language I love it, it's a very industrial look and it's very clean there are no screws at least no visible screws you got to pop off covers to get to them it's a really nice looking card the Geforce logo lights up with white LEDs it's not green like previous years and you can't change the colour or anything at least not that I can tell you also can't turn it off in software at least not in the evj x1 so it's just white LEDs and it looks pretty clean and there's also some faint white LEDs as well on the x design across the front and the back of the card. There's also a new 12 pin power connector so the way this works is it takes two eight-pin PCI-E connections and it pipes it into a single 12 pin.
They include the adapter it's like a y-shaped splitter I don't love it it doesn't matter how you spin it like it just looks unattractive and it takes away from the overall amazing design aesthetic of this GPU but if you want this design aesthetic and you want this you know fin based design language you got to go for that connection okay let's talk about performance the RTX 3080 is just so powerful that most games played in 1080p are gonna be stupid fast like this GPU only really gets to show off its stuff when it's playing in 1440p or in 4k resolution and this is all without ray tracing we'll get to ray trace stuff in a bit so there are some crazy games like red dead redemption 2 that can be super graphically demanding like it can fill up the full 10 gigs of video ram but in general 1440p and 4k gaming runs crazy high frame rates on this card. Now I played both on a 65-inch 4k omen tv and some regular monitors but it's just so nice to see this kind of resolution running at super-high frame rates right you got to look for it you got to stick your face right up to the screen but yeah if you're playing on a high-resolution display and you like to crank up your graphics settings this will deliver some super smooth visuals.
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Now to use this card I had to build a completely different system so this case here like the ghost s1 this is how I normally this is where my builds usually go into right small form factor but this card is a little different uh there's two or three things you need to be aware of if you want to put this thing into your system number one it's a slightly longer length so this thing runs at 285 millimetres instead of like the regular 267 so if you have a really small case this may not fit this does fit in the ghost s1 if you are interested but another issue that i ran into on this thing the power requirements so I used to run a 600-watt power supply on my old setups and you could get away with it even the 2080 ti could run on the 600-watt power supply this does not I tried it chokes it actually doesn't run at 600 watts I think you could get away with 650 I wouldn't recommend it and I'd end up going with a regular atx power supply like a 750 watt one but because it was a larger power supply I had to build into a larger case so for the people that like to build into small form factor cases like I do. You got to keep that in mind we'll get into power consumption a little bit at the end.
I want to talk about the fans for a second the fan configuration on the founder's edition the 3080 is quite unique so it's got two fans one on each side one is like a cross through airflow and then the second fan exhausts out the back now this particular fan configuration I think is good only in cases that have good airflow like if you have a small form factor case like I normally like to build in this cross through fan can push heat into the system but if you have a regular case with good airflow it's a great thermal design the fans themselves I really like them again if you have a normal case they are super quiet like way quieter than i thought they would be number one the fans don't need to spin if the GPU isn't particularly hot so after you boot it if this thing's around 65 degrees celsius or lower the fans are completely still like they don't even move and it's weird right you see this Nvidia GPU plugged into your computer and it's like what's going on like is this thing busted they don't actually spin until they get to a particular temperature once it's spinning it's still super quiet like weirdly quiet for in high-end Nvidia GPU the thing is if you have bad airflow in your case and these fans need to spin up at max, it is an annoying sound it's not super loud but it is a higher pitched wine that is quite unpleasant but that only exists in again with cases with poor airflow but in I think like 95 of builds you're gonna love the thermal design and the acoustics of this GPU uh okay.
I want to talk about ray tracing because I think ray tracing is where this GPU really shines so a couple years ago when RTX 20 series GPUs first came out the performance with ray traced games weren't great especially for the cost of those cards even the 20 ti didn't have amazing RTX performance the 3080 at 700 delivers like 35 to maybe 40 better ray-tracing performance than a 2080 ti it's a really good ray trace games look amazing right stuff just looks so different it's this visual treat to see these types of graphics like the shadows the reflections the lighting it's all done so well and this kind of image quality isn't new right we've been able to see this for a while but being able to use ray tracing while maintaining a high frame rate like this at a reasonable price is significant it's special like if you think about what this is going to do the 30 series GPUs like eventually the 3060 the 3070s they're going to come out and when those come out this type of tech like reasonably priced ray-tracing capable GPUs is gonna it's gonna spread right more and more gamers are gonna have access to this kind of ray tracing capability with their cards and then the developers now there's a real incentive for developers to put in the effort and the time to make ray tracing available in games like I think this is going to be a turning point not the specific card but the 30 series is going to be a real huge turning point in ray tracing for games like you saw what that stuff looks like it is so nice.
It's a whole new type of gaming and the pricing is becoming reasonable now I want to close off this video with a conversation of power consumption I think this is my one and only major concern I have about these new GPUs the RTX 3080 the founder's edition pulls around 320 and maybe 330 watts at the peak it's it's a pretty power-hungry GPU now compare this to last year's or two years ago the 2080 ti that pulled around 280 at peak so about a 50 watt difference which is not super significant but if you look at percentages this is like a 20 power draw for about a 35 maybe 40 depending on the type of gaming and resolution let's say 35 to be conservative 35 percent better performance for 20 increase in power consumption. Its price point be able to offer this kind of hardware for 700 bucks or if you go with the 30 70 500 bucks it's something special like to have this kind of high-resolution high frame rate gaming and you can trace some raise while you're doing it it's going to last you so many years right and so I feel like if you have money and you're looking at this it's an easy recommendation for me okay.
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