ASUS RTX 3080 OC Strix Review

Test Setup

With the RTX cards potentially requiring PCI Express 4.0, and the impressive performance from the AMD Ryzen 3 CPUs, we thought it was the perfect time to revamp our GPU test rig, and if we’re changing the bench rig we need to throw away all of our results. This meant that we’ve spent a lot of time choosing new games that would be show off the next generation of GPUs whilst also covering the majority of the type of games people play. Yes we could use DOTA and Fortnite if we’re just going for popularity, but neither of those really stretch your graphical capabilities.

We’ve also slightly switched up our graphs too. By and large we’re the same as before with the three resolutions, but we’re including frame percentile results too. Just showing a minimum frame rate is pointless as you could have one single frame that was lagged and the card would look worse than it is. Instead the percentile shows the average of those bottom results, which are more representative of real-world ‘worst case’ expectations.

ASUS RTX 3080 OC Strix
AMD Ryzen 9 3950X
ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Formula
Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB Series DDR4 3600MHz
Corsair RM1000i PSU
Corsair iCUE H150i RGB Pro XT AIO
Corsair MP600 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD
Corsiar Obsidian 500D RGB SE
Windows 10 x64 “May 2020” Update

Clock Speeds

The Strix has two BIOS modes, Performance and Quiet, but if you take the time to download their software you’ll find a third mode, OC mode. This boosts things even further, albeit at the usual price of heat generation and power draw, but it’s still free extra performance should you require it. This will be the mode we’ll use throughout our testing, although we’ve used both Performance and OC modes in Gears 5 for those of you who like comparisons, and all three options in our power and thermal graphs.

 

This is the extra 30MHz that the OC mode shows in GPUz, although there are some under the hood changes too we suspect to the power target and the like.

  

 

Probably the biggest surprise is that the Quiet mode just edges the Performance mode in average clock speed. Hopefully the reasons for us using OC mode throughout today’s review are clear from the graph below though.