Gigabyte RTX 5080 Aorus Master Review

Conclusion

Conclusion

If our time with the Blackwell GPU cards from Nvidia it’s that they have produced a product which is incredibly consistent. However, in a turn of great news for those of us who count ourselves as enthusiasts, whilst the baseline performance is uniform across all the cards, they’ve also ensured that companies which go the extra mile get rewarded. That might seem a juxtaposition but it isn’t. What we mean is that a company which makes no effort and just slaps a couple of fans on a card will still produce a fast card. But companies like Gigabyte with the RTX 5080 Aorus Master, are rewarded in performance terms for trying harder.

The first thing you notice about the Aorus Master is the thing which has been dominating the top of these pages. Namely, that cooler. It’s a beast. it’s not the thickest cooler we’ve seen on the 5000 cards, and yet the small backplate and extra thick heatsink make it look the chunkiest of all. The backplate cutout is certainly as large as any we’ve come across, and works like a charm. Go back a page and see how much power the RTX 5080 Aorus Master draws – power = heat – and yet also see how low down the temperature graph it is. This is a cooler that absolutely does the job. Worth noting also that we ran without the extra fan.

Loveliness

Gigabyte deserve a lot of credit for this design. ASUS bolted a fan to the cutout and made people living halfway across town go deaf. The Gigabyte Aorus Master makes that fan optional, so you can enjoy quiet if you like, but also made it relatively quiet in use. We’re not pretending it’s a be quiet! Silent Wings 4 level of silence, but it’s not intolerable. And, again, it’s optional. The card is plenty fast and quiet without it.

The Gigabyte RTX 5080 Aorus Master continues the legend that has become the Aorus brand by being well built, cool and, most importantly, fast. It wins our OC3D Performance Award.

Discuss the Gigabyte RTX 5080 Aorus Master in our OC3D Forums.