Published: August 16, 2021 | Source: ASUS | Author: Tom Logan

ASUS RTX 3080 Ti TUF Review

Conclusion

The ASUS RTX 3080 Ti TUF is a great example of our recent discussions regarding the consistency of modern hardware. Whereas once upon a time you had to spend the money for flagship models to really extract the most from your chosen item, nowadays so much of the technology is controlled by the main manufacturer – Nvidia in this case – that it’s very difficult to create a bad model.

Whatever differences there are between a flagship model and one that is at the more affordable end of their respective range is instead down to a matter of aesthetics or extra, non-essential, features. The TUF demonstrates this perfectly.

Whilst there was a, rightful, uproar regarding the pricing of the RTX 3080 Ti cards, especially in light of the supply difficulties, it remains a GPU which is capable of giving you very nearly RTX 3090 levels of performance for significantly less cost. Perhaps the Nvidia problem was one of branding. After all, if you take the Ti models to be slightly better versions of the regular card then one would expect the price to not be significantly raised. The RTX 3080 Ti might sound like it’s a better RTX 3080, whereas it’s really a RTX 3090 with less memory. Not only was everyone cross that the Ampere cards were nearly impossible to find, but then the new card being the best part of twice the price of the vanilla 3080 seemed insane. Once you see it from the light of a 3090 though it makes a lot of sense, being the flagship card but better priced.

In TUF guise it’s stripped of any aesthetic high points such as we saw from the Strix, and instead is all about giving you a RTX 3080 Ti, with excellent cooling, and at a price which is very affordable when compared to other graphics cards based around this particular Nvidia GPU. We’ve often spoken about how you look at your monitor not in to your case, and if you do then you’ll be thrilled at what the TUF can do for you. As you saw in our performance graphs there is little to choose between any of the RTX 3080 Ti cards we’ve reviewed, and the thermal graph showed how great the chunky heatsink and triple fan design is at dissipating heat.

It might not have the flair of other cards, but we know many people who are happy to have something a little less shouty in their system rather than the RGB heavy designs available elsewhere, and with just the TUF logo lighting up the card is certainly stealthy. With cool temperatures and low fan noise you don’t notice it for that reason either. What you do notice is the incredible performance available in all resolutions and detail settings that is the hallmark of the RTX 3080 Ti range.

If you want to bring a RTX 3080 Ti in to your gaming world you would do well to investigate the ASUS RTX 3080 Ti TUF. Its no-nonsense design is married to high performance and a, relatively (based on other 3080 Ti’s), low price of entry and wins our OC3D Gamers Choice Award.