Nvidia RTX 3080 Founders Edition Review

Test Setup

With the RTX cards potentially requiring PCI Express 4.0, and the impressive performance from the AMD Ryzen 3 CPUs, we thought it was the perfect time to revamp our GPU test rig, and if we’re changing the bench rig we need to throw away all of our results. This meant that we’ve spent a lot of time choosing new games that would be show off the next generation of GPUs whilst also covering the majority of the type of games people play. Yes we could use DOTA and Fortnite if we’re just going for popularity, but neither of those really stretch your graphical capabilities.

We’ve also slightly switched up our graphs too. By and large we’re the same as before with the three resolutions, but we’re including frame percentile results too. Just showing a minimum frame rate is pointless as you could have one single frame that was lagged and the card would look worse than it is. Instead the percentile shows the average of those bottom results, which are more representative of real-world ‘worst case’ expectations.

Nvidia RTX 3080 Founders Edition – Driver: 456.16
AMD Ryzen 9 3950X
ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Formula
Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB Series DDR4 3600MHz
Corsair RM1000i PSU
Corsair iCUE H150i RGB Pro XT AIO
Corsair MP600 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD
Corsiar Obsidian 500D RGB SE
Windows 10 x64 “May 2020” Update

Overclocking

There are a couple of things to be aware of with our overclocking efforts on the RTX 3080 FE. Firstly, like so many of our reviews, we’re running on pre-release drivers. This brings it’s own issues in certain games, but the biggest effect for this particular bit of the review is that the MSI Afterburner overclocking tool doesn’t allow voltage adjustment and without the Nvidia OC Scanner tool (it wasnt ready when we were testing) we ended up being cautious, although as you’ll see from our results it doesn’t stop the RTX 3080 FE stomping the competition regardless. 

We will come back to this and spend more time refining things at a later date and maybe even do a minor retest to see how things change as drivers mature.