Packaging

The Card

Wow! The Colorful RTX 4080 Ultra White looks amazing. The main color is white as the name suggests, but there's plenty of colorful highlights. For example, the cooler shroud is painted with a color-changing material that shines in various hues, depending on the viewing angle. The metal backplate has red highlights.


I tried capturing the various colors, it looks even more gorgeous in real-life.


Colorful has placed an RGB illuminated element in the card.


Dimensions of the card are 32.0 x 13.5 cm, and it weighs 1606 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


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

There's also a push-button here that enables the "Turbo" BIOS. This is really confusing, as the default setting is "off," and that means the card is running at stock clocks and power limit—quite surprising for a product sold as "OC." You only get the OC clocks when you manually switch the button after buying the card—I'm sure a lot of people aren't aware of that. Usually I test all cards at their factory BIOS, but in this case I ran all performance tests with the "Turbo" BIOS active.

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 (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.

Teardown

The baseplate soaks up heat from the GPU quickly and moves it through seven heatpipes to the heatsink. The main heatsink also provides cooling for the VRM and memory chips.


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