Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti FE Review

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The RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition packaging is identical to the regular RTX 3080 packaging with bold silver stripes against a black background. Funny how Nvidia demand a giant green box identifying the card on the partner card packaging, but not their own.

  
  

It’s a classy looking thing, with the soft curves and muted palette fitting perfectly into its high density foam protector. If you like packaging which gives you the impression of a premium product before you’ve even got your hands on it then the Founders Edition is right up your street.

  

From the front the Founders Edition in Ti trim is identical to its stablemates with the fan on the right pushing air to the upper section of your case whilst the fan under the RTX 3080 Ti branding cools the components then spits the hot air out of the back of your case instead of spilling it out the sides to gradually warm your components up.

  

Looking at it from the reverse side you get a better indication of the ‘straight through’ fan design on the inside of the card, helping push cold air towards your CPU cooler.

  

The power connector is still the strange ’12 pins in the middle of the card’ arrangement that we saw on the original Ampere Founders Edition cards. How much this bothers you is very much a matter of taste. We can appreciate the design reasons that have placed it in the middle, but we’d still prefer to not have to use an adaptor to power our GPU.

  

Outputs are the now common Nvidia selection of a single HDMI 8K60 and three DisplayPorts. The Type-C USB port seems to have vanished.

  

Despite looking identical externally at least Nvidia have used a Ti brand on the model identifier. How long before you can buy the left plate from some dodgy Chinese website and sell your card as a Ti when it isn’t? Because externally it’s impossible to tell other than the addition of those two letters.