Gigabyte RTX 4080 Aero Review
Conclusion
We’ve already seen that the RTX 4080 is an outstandingly capable card, easily matching – and regularly beating – the RTX 3090 Ti. How Nvidia have managed to upgrade their already impressive Tensor and RT Cores to give so much extra performance is nothing short of jaw-dropping. The RTX 2080 Ti already out-performed the AMD equivalent in ray tracing performance, and the Ampere cards put significant distance between it and the 2000 series. Now the 4000 series has put the 3000 series in the shade too. Imagine where we’ll be in ten years time. Crazy.
But we’re concentrating just on the Gigabyte RTX 4080 Aero here, and as you saw it was in the ballpark of the Founders Edition card in performance terms. We saw a slight increase in the average boost clock thanks to that incredibly capable cooler, and this was generally reflected in our graphs. Admittedly it’s only a handful of MegaHertz at the top end, but that can be enough to gain you some additional performance, and we’re a sucker for more speed and smoothness.
Where the Gigabyte Aero scores highly is in the design and cooling capacity of that chunky heatsink and shroud. We know many of you, hell I work for one, who prefer a white, or at least silver, system to the black ones that are so common and if you count yourself amongst that number then the Aero will tick a lot of your aesthetic boxes. As well as being white and light silver the lighting is subdued, perfect if you’ve grown weary of systems that look like an explosion in a rainbow factory. It isn’t just for show either as we saw a peak temperature of only 65°C, well below the 80 threshhold we like to stop at, and the delta temperature was only 43°C showing how good the cooler is.
Whilst it might not have the cachet of their more famous Aorus brand, the Gigabyte Aero combines excellent performance with its own design philosophy and isn’t going to empty your bank account in the same way their Aorus label might. It’s fast enough, sleek, cool and quiet. What’s not to like?
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