Nvidia RTX 5080 Founders Edition Review

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If you’ve already seen our coverage of the RTX 5090 Founders Edition then you can skip this. The Nvidia RTX 5080 Founders Edition is identical. It even comes in the same, easily recyclable box.

Seriously Nvidia deserve some credit for the Founders Edition packaging. As the ice caps melt around us, anything that helps, helps. Given the numbers that Nvidia are going to be producing the RTX 5080 in, the scale of savings is almost unfathomable. Our grandchildren thank them.

Once out of the packaging the Nvidia RTX 5080 FE has the same design and smooth feel of its bigger sibling. Remember when Apple tried to introduce a pebble design philosophy? The FE feels a bit like that. It’s very smooth in the hand, with few sharp edges. We’ve already seen how capable it is at cooling the GB202 GPU.

It’s almost like Nvidia have made the RTX 5080 Founders Edition deliberately understated. All the partner cards are quad slot monsters with RGB out the wazoo. The FE, just a tiny bit of lettering. It feels like a deliberate flex.

We know that the ATX3 power connector had some teething troubles in the early days. That’s long been solved with longer pins. So if you look at this and shudder, fear not.

Some ideas are so obviously better than all that’s come before you’re left aghast at how long it took to think of. The Nvidia air vent is one such idea. They used it, everyone copied it immediately, and our system temperatures rejoiced.