Introduction

ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4080 OC is the company's top air-cooled, factory overclocked rendition of the GeForce RTX 4080 "Ada" being launched today, and the company's attempt to beat the NVIDIA Founders Edition in the aesthetics game. Premium multi-tone metal surfaces and a cyberpunk-esque ensemble of shapes concealing RGB LED elements, create something that truly elevates your gaming PC build's appearance. This is also the physically-largest custom-design RTX 4080 we have in our wide selection of custom-design graphics card reviews published for you today.

NVIDIA designed the GeForce RTX 4080 "Ada" with many of the same design goals as its generational flagship launched last month, the RTX 4090. With this card, you get to play any of today's games at 4K Ultra HD with maxed out settings, including ray tracing; but at a more acceptable price-point of $1,200 (NVIDIA baseline price), which is 25% less than that of the RTX 4090. Of course partners like ASUS have done a ton of value-addition, and so their premium custom-designs will be priced higher. This ASUS ROG Strix, for example, is priced at $1550, which is just $50 shy of the RTX 4090 baseline.



The RTX 4080 succeeds both the RTX 3080 10 GB and the RTX 3080 12 GB. This was originally meant to be the RTX 4080 16 GB, with a more affordable $900 12 GB variant supposed to launch today, which NVIDIA decided not to launch due to a branding problem. The RTX 4080 16 GB still has a mighty specs-sheet, with 9,728 CUDA cores, 304 4th gen Tensor Cores, 76 3rd gen RT cores, 304 TMUs, and 112 ROPs. While NVIDIA has enlarged the memory size generationally to 16 GB GDDR6X, the memory bus is actually narrower, at 256-bit. The memory ticks at a higher data-rate of 22.4 Gbps (compared to 19 Gbps of the RTX 3080), and the company enlarged the on-die caches on the silicon, which should make up for the slight bandwidth shortfall.

The ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4080 OC features the same "Vented Exoskeleton" cooling solution that made the RTX 4090 ROG Strix stand out as the most premium custom-design, which is among the largest and heavies air-cooling solutions out there. The card offers factory overclocked speeds of 2.62 GHz compared to 2.50 GHz reference, and all of the premium aesthetic and functional features as the RTX 4090 ROG Strix, with a few handy inclusions such as case fan headers and dual-BIOS.