Packaging

The Card

ASUS created an amazing new look for their GeForce 40 Series graphics cards. Both the main cooler shroud and the backplate are made of thick metal. While the color theme on the backplate is black with silvery highlights, the front introduces gradients of blue and red that look mighty good. The colors change subtly as you adjust your viewing angle of the card.


Dimensions of the card are 36.0 x 15.0 cm, and it weighs 2440 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4a ports and two HDMI 2.1a (same technology as Ampere).

NVIDIA introduced the concept of dual NVDEC and NVENC Codecs with the Ada architecture. This means there are two independent sets of hardware-accelerators; so you can encode and decode two streams of video in parallel or one stream at double the FPS rate. The new 8th Gen NVENC now accelerates AV1 encoding, besides HEVC. You also get an "optical flow accelerator" unit that is able to calculate intermediate frames for videos, to smooth playback. The same hardware unit is used for frame generation in DLSS 3.


The card uses the new 12+4 pin ATX 12VHPWR connector, which is rated for up to 600 W of power draw. An adapter cable from 3x PCIe 8-pin is included (which is rated for up to 450 W). Of course the 4x 8-pin to 16-pin adapter cables from RTX 4090 will also work with the RTX 4080, but the card won't need that much power.


This BIOS switch lets you toggle from the default performance BIOS to the quiet BIOS which runs a more relaxed fan curve.


Near the back of the card you'll find two fan headers that run the connected fans at the same speed as the GPU fans, including fan stop. This makes it a great option to control the case fans according to graphics card temperature.

Teardown

The ASUS thermal solution is massive, it uses a vapor-chamber base to soak up heat from the GPU quickly, and seven heatpipes are connected to the heatsink. The main heatsink also provides cooling for the VRM and memory chips.


The backplate is made of thick metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.