Gigabyte RTX 3080 Gaming OC 10G Review

Conclusion

Gigabyte has returned to the forefront of the GPU market with their Aorus range of products and that solidifying of their market position has allowed them to return to their Gaming range with renewed impetus. The RTX 2080 Ti was spectacularly good, but they removed our left kidney for the privilege. With the launch of the RTX 3080 Nvidia have brought performance that beats the best of the Turing cards and at a price that seriously undercuts their previous flagship too. So we wanted to check out the very affordable Gigabyte RTX 3080 Gaming OC 10G.

With a sub £700 price tag it still is definitely in the affordable bracket for a 3080. Still, you get all the other benefits of buying a card from a partner vendor, with the Windforce triple-fan cooler performing a fantastic job in keeping things both frosty and quiet. We’re fans of anything that can reduce the heat soak into our system allowing our whole setup to run much faster, but we don’t want to have to live in headphones or place our case in a soundproof box to appreciate it. If you’re old enough to remember the days of strapping Delta fans to your cooler, just to keep things cold, you’ll be as amazed continuously by how much things have moved forwards. The Windforce might imply loud noises, but it doesn’t bring them to the table, even under harsh gaming/benchmarking conditions.

Excellent cooling has clear benefits in performance terms too. Nvidia GPU Boost has been a boon to anyone who just wants more performance without spending days fine-tuning their clock speeds. This graphics card relies largely upon thermal headroom to achieve even higher speeds, and the Gigabyte Gaming makes full use of that technology. Out of the box, it’s hardly a sloth with a 1770 MHz rated boost speed, but as you can see from our graph back on page three, the Gigabyte card gives us the highest average speed of the four cards we’ve reviewed during this busy launch week, with an average boost clock of 1975 MHz, peaking at 2040. It’s 4 MHz higher than our overclocked Founders Edition and 30 MHz faster than the next best card, the MSI Gaming X Trio.

That performance on paper is reflected in the results we saw throughout our testing. All of the RTX 3080s come with true, jaw-dropping levels of performance thanks to their increased core counts in almost every regard going along with the faster GDDR6X, but the Gigabyte is right there at the top fairly regularly. Considering this is by no means the most expensive card we’ve looked at, nor will it be the most expensive once the Strix/Lightning/Aorus Ultra’s appear, yet the performance is gob-smacking.

With quality component choices allied to an excellent cooler and all based upon the blazing speed of the new Ampere GPU from Nvidia, the Gigabyte RTX 3080 Gaming OC 10G would be our choice of the three cards we have reviewed on launch day with an awesome combination of price, performance and cooling. It’s a no-frills fit and forget card that will allow you to concentrate on what’s important… Gaming.

   

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