Gigabyte RTX 3080 Gaming OC 10G Review
Up Close
There is a lot to unpick from the Gigabyte RTX 3080 Gaming OC 10G box. We’re not sure if the pupil of this particular eye is meant to look like Iron Man’s Arc Reactor, but if it’s accidental then fair play. If you tilted the right hand side up to make it level it would make for an epic custom case design too. Maybe something for Gigabyte to think about. Hands up all those who’d like a limited run case that looks like this. Exactly.
The Gaming OC 10G has the familiar Gigabyte Windforce triple fan cooler in place. Since its inception a few years ago this cooler has joined the ASUS DirectCU and MSI Frozr series as one of the best around, combining our twin passions of excellent cooling and low noise. This is helped tremendously by the alternate rotation of the central fan, which helps eliminate dead spots and assists pressure build up.
The Gaming OC has a big backplate with plenty of vent holes to help maximise your airflow and keep those thousands of cores cool. We’re not overly keen on the big cutout on the left hand side by the PCI bracket, although we understand why it’s there to some degree, as it helps show off the famous Gigabyte Dual-BIOS system. If you’re lighting heavy in your system build then the silver effect backplate should help reflect that light too.
Looking at the side of the card you can see how densely packed the heatsink fins are, and you can also catch a glimpse of those big copper heatpipes that help spread the thermal loading across the full length of the card. The Gigabyte logo follows the trend we’ve seen from the Nvidia and MSI cards too, by being greatly reduced in size when compared to the big attention-grabbing logos of previous cards.
The bottom edge of the card always has a lot less design details because it’s always facing your motherboard, or the bottom of your case if you’re an alternate orientation builder, but there are still plenty of chances to stare closely at the beefiness of that heatsink.
The blunt end of the RTX 3080 Gaming OC 10G helps focus the air across the main body of the card rather than letting it spill out into the middle of your case. It also works in conjunction with the vents in the backplate to push some air across the heatsink, aiding in lowering your running temperatures still further.
Here are those vents, as well as the two 8 pin PCIe power inputs. Of the three cards we’ve looked at so far – with the ASUS still to come – this is the most familiar power arrangement.
Lastly the business end of the card has one extra HDMI port than the default Nvidia design, for those of you with a surfeit of monitors to connect. So that’s three DisplayPort 1.4 and two HDMI 2.1 suppporting up to 8K @ 60Hz.
