ASUS Strix RTX 3080 Ti LC Watercooled Review

ASUS Strix RTX 3080 Ti Watercooled Review

Introduction

The second of our three launch RTX 3080 Ti reviews is the ASUS Strix RTX 3080 Ti. Rather than going all in on their DirectCU cooler we’ve all seen many times in its Strix guise, ASUS have instead adopted a twin fan AIO to ensure that heat will never become an issue.

With the beefier internals of the RTX 3080 Ti when compared to the regular Ampere RTX 3080, allied to awater cooled plate covering the GPU and memory, the GPU Boost 4.0 technology should certainly hit good heights. Instead of using the waterblock to also cool the power section ASUS have instead, somewhat curiously, used a regular blower fan. It’s a bit of a mix of modern AIO and old-school air cooling ideas.

Naturally though, being part of the Republic of Gamers brand, we’re expecting big things from the newest addition to the wildly popular Strix range. Particularly given that we’ve already seen how capable the new RTX 3080 Ti is in Nvidia’s own Founders Edition. More cooling always equals more performance. There is only one way to find out though so let’s crack on with our testing.

Technical Specifications

The primary differences between the RTX 3080 and the RTX 3080 Ti are to be found in all the important places. The Ti has 12 extra Shader Modules which give 48 extra Tensor Cores, 12 extra RT Cores, and 1536 more CUDA Cores. In case that doesn’t feel like enough the Texture Unit quota has been upped from 272 to 320, whilst you have another 16 ROPs to play with too. Video Memory has been increased from 10GB to 12GB and it’s now at 384-bit instead of 320, which brings the bandwidth up from 760 GB/s to 912 GB/. All in all it’s a total improvement from the RTX 3080 that’s so popular.

Away from the difference on a purely architectural level the Strix itself runs at 1830 MHz rated Boost Clock and has a 240mm AIO bolted on. So let’s see that in the flesh.

  RTX 3080 FE Strix RTX 3080 Ti FE
SMs 68 80
CUDA Cores 8704 10240
Tensor Cores 272 320
RT Cores 68 80
Texture Units 272 320
ROPs 96 112
Boost Clock 1710 MHz 1830 MHz
Memory Clock 9500 MHz 9500 MHz
Video Memory 10240 MB GDDR6X 12GB GDDR6X
Memory Interface 320-bit 384-bit
Memory Bandwidth 760 GB/s 912 GB/s
TGP 320W 350W