Palit RTX 5080 GameRock OC Review

Up Close

Up Close

There are two different versions of the RTX 5080 GameRock, and as you can see we’ve the overclocked model today. 2617MHz for the vanilla card, 2730MHz boost for our OC model. As you can see from the back of the box, Palit aren’t backwards in coming forwards.

The front of the new GameRock has what Palit are calling the Chameleon Panel. This is designed to give you different colours depending upon your viewing angle. It’s certainly calmer than the kaleidoscopic effect on the previous generation.

Around the back we find one of the bigger cut outs we’ve seen. Usually manufacturers put this in for cooling, but then their backplate designers fill the space with laser cut logos. Not so Palit. The GameRock OC is only filled by the girthy heatsink.

As you can see from it side on, either way you look at the RTX 5080 GameRock OC you get a sense of scale. It’s, like the ASUS and Zotac, thick. So thick it could run for president. Peeking through the covers are the composite heatpipes that lead to the Vapour Chamber. Rather than just be on the GPU, the Palit Vapour Chamber covers the GPU and VRAM for continued high performance.

Colourful

Side on you can start to see the Chameleon Panel doing its thing. Whether you like it or not depends largely upon if you like a wall of the same colour or not. We think a bit of boldness is good. There is too much uniformity in the world.

The P Mode stands for Performance – S for Silent – and aggressively ramps up the fan curves. If you prefer a more gradual RPM increase the Silent mode is for you.

As well as the redesigned power connector that has eliminated all the early teething troubles, the Palit RTX 5080 GameRock OC has a ARGB connector, should you prefer to control the lighting with your motherboard than with the ThunderMaster software.

Lastly at the business end we can see the honeycomb lattice that gives us a glimpse of how thick the heatsink is. Fans of displays will note that the GameRock, like 99% of Nvidia cards, has a single HDMI and three DisplayPorts.