NVIDIA RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition Pictured, Thanks to iBUYPOWER

[btarunr]

We recently did an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER Founders Edition unboxing preview; and although NVIDIA has announced all three of its RTX 40-series SUPER graphics cards, including the RTX 4080 SUPER that goes on sale this January 31; nobody in the press has an RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition sample yet. At the iBUYPOWER booth, we caught one. As a major OEM/SI, the company has access to these, and there's no NDA in place preventing us from picturing it. We just can't show you what it drives like, until later this month.

So then, the RTX 4080 SUPER comes in a similar big black box to the one the RTX 4070 SUPER came in, which opens out along a diagonal axis, to reveal the card. The card is huge, triple slot-thick, and bears geometric resemblance to the original RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 Founders Edition cards. What's new is that the magnesium-alloy outer frame of the cooler is now matte-black, and contrasted with diamond-cut edges that are glossy black (though not silver-chrome). The heatsink remains matte black thanks to its ceramic surface treatment; the body panel behind the PCB has the RTX 4080 SUPER embossed logo. The RTX 4080 SUPER starts selling from January 31, at a starting price of $999.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Bwaze]

"A starting price of $999" - I bet we'll see much higher prices right from the start, due to "limited manufacturing capacity" due to Nvidia's focus on AI. But the MSRP will remain comfortably low, just to tease us.

 

[theouto]

Maybe the VRAM not being 20 gigs is a blessing in disguise as it means that using that card for ML purposes will be harder, and thus won't be bought up for that purpose like the 4090s.

 

[Vya Domus]

"A starting price of $999" - I bet we'll see much higher prices right from the start, due to "limited manufacturing capacity" due to Nvidia's focus on AI. But the MSRP will remain comfortably low, just to tease us.

Given that 4090 prices have ballooned to like 2.5K, yeah, you're never gonna see this for 1000$.

 

[Shou Miko]

Maybe the VRAM not being 20 gigs is a blessing in disguise as it means that using that card for ML purposes will be harder, and thus won't be bought up for that purpose like the 4090s.

That's just NGreedia that means this look at AMD they price their cards better than Nvidia even with more vram because Nvidia's is afraid that if they put more vram on their customer cards some of the people that buy their Quadro cards will buy a GeForce instead since it has the same size memory.

But that's not really true because the Quadro line offers driver related things that the GeForce cards don't like specific drivers for Autocad and more.

 

[Vayra86]

1K for a sub top card.

Lmao. Never. Ada is also already halfway down its refresh cycle, even 800 is rich.

 

[Bwaze]

"Moore's Law is dead … It's completely over, and so the idea that a chip is going to go down in cost over time, unfortunately, is a story of the past."

With RTX 4090 at 2000 EUR we could see shops trying to get 1300 - 1500 EUR for RTX 4080 Super - after all, it will be faster than discontinued RTX 4080 that goes for 1150 EUR.

And when the Ada cards arrive, I wouldn't be surprised if the price for RTX 5080 will be set at 1800 USD / EUR. That's 1200 + 50%, since we should have as much price increase as there is performance increase, by the new Jensen's Law, since Moore's dead.

 

[R0H1T]

Remember you don't have to buy these cards, it's like asking unarmed robbers to not break into your house & empty your safe ~ totally involuntary

 

[Easo]

Remember you don't have to buy these cards, it's like asking unarmed robbers to not break into your house & empty your safe ~ totally involuntary

At some point you will have to upgrade anyway. What then?

 

[Hyderz]

At some point you will have to upgrade anyway. What then?

So purchase the gpu when you feel it’s struggling with modern games, higher prices are here to stay whether you like it or not just purchase sensibly and not upgrade every time a new gpu comes out.

 

[theouto]

So purchase the gpu when you feel it’s struggling with modern games, higher prices are here to stay whether you like it or not just purchase sensibly and not upgrade every time a new gpu comes out.

Even if one doesn't upgrade every time a new gpu comes out it won't make the price of a new good gpu sting any less, specially those gpus that can actually last multiple generations. And if recent game releases are anything to go by, unless we are fine using upscaling at 1080p only to get 60fps then those gpus that can actually run games at desirable settings are still gonna cost more coins than most of us want to pay, I doubt anyone has a portion of their salary allocated every month for their next GPU purchase.

 

[Bwaze]

But that's OK too, Nvidia can always label some shipping containers of cards bought for AI acceleration by China as "Gaming", so they can beat their chests as gaming kings, even when noone buys their cards for gaming.

Threats by boycott only work if your boycott makes a difference. And while the AI craze is in full swing (or as Nvidia predicts, it only just begun), gamers are irrelevant, just as we were during cryptomadness.

 

[Vya Domus]

But that's OK too, Nvidia can always label some shipping containers of cards bought for AI acceleration by China as "Gaming", so they can beat their chests as gaming kings, even when noone buys their cards for gaming.

The only card that's sought after is the 4090 because of the memory but it's still a low volume product, they don't really care, if you need serious computing power you rent cloud instances, you don't buy thousands of 4090s, it's easier to circumvent any restrictions that way anyway. You can still buy a 4090 whenever you want, even if it's at an exorbitant price, this means the demand still doesn't quite outclass the supply like it was with mining.

Trust me, a lot more Tesla's end up used by China than gaming cards.

 

[FeelinFroggy]

"Moore's Law is dead … It's completely over, and so the idea that a chip is going to go down in cost over time, unfortunately, is a story of the past."

Moore's law has nothing to do with cost, but I get your point. I guess your forgetting about performance increases. GPUs are not going down in price as they raise performance. That's not how this works. The 4060 is probably on par with the 1080ti and cost half the price at launch. That's what you should be looking at.

The real reason GPUs have gone up so much over the past decade is about demand. Demand has gone through the roof with GPU's from crypto to AI to gaming. Demand has gone through the roof for GPUs and that is what is driving up the price.