This is my seventh GeForce RTX 3080 review, this time from Colorful, one of the biggest players on the Chinese market. Their graphics cards have a long history of being just a little bit more over the top compared to others. The Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3080 Vulcan OC is the company's flagship for the RTX 3080 series. Besides the massive cooler, it offers a unique feature, a small LCD screen that lets you display vital stats of your graphics card and CPU.

Out of the box, the Vulcan OC runs at 1710 MHz rated boost, which matches the NVIDIA Founders Edition clocks exactly. I hear you ask why this card is called 'OC' then. Well, I was a bit surprised at first, too. It seems the OC settings are activated only when you press the dual BIOS "Turbo" button near the rear I/O bracket. With the Turbo BIOS active, the card runs at 1800 MHz rated boost, which is higher than most other RTX 3080 custom designs. At the same time, the power limit is raised from 320 W to 370 W—this will make a big difference, having more impact than just the rated boost clock. The difference between the BIOSes is so big, I decided to fully test both to show proper product performance.

Averaged over our whole game testing suite at 4K resolution, the Vulcan OC with the default BIOS is 1% faster than the NVIDIA Founders Edition, which is not a whole lot. The Turbo BIOS works much better, running 3% faster than the default BIOS, which brings the total uplift against the FE to 4%. Albeit not a huge difference, it is still a decent increase for a RTX 3080 custom design. Compared to the RTX 2080 Ti, the card is 37% faster, a pretty impressive gap. The uplift against the RTX 2080 Super is almost 65%. AMD's top dog, the Radeon RX 5700 XT, will only give you half (!) the FPS of the iGame RTX 3080. AMD is announcing new graphics cards soon, which are expected to change this situation, but I doubt they'll match the RTX 3080. RTX 3090 is less than 10% faster at much higher cost—barely worth it.

I still don't get why Colorful would use such weak settings on their default BIOS. I'm sure a lot of gamers who aren't tech geeks will miss the Turbo button completely and run their card at sub-optimal settings, while paying extra for the "overclocking" printed on the package they'll never use.

If you are looking for a fluid 4K gaming experience, the RTX 3080 is the card you want. At lower resolutions, many games are CPU bottlenecked though, so the card won't be able to play out its full potential. The RTX 3080 is also a good option for 1440p high refresh-rate gaming, but I definitely wouldn't spend that much money just for Full HD 1080p gaming.

Visually, the iGame RTX 3080 Vulcan looks great because of a mix of gray, silver, and black paired with an edgy cooler shroud that's not too distracting. The Colorful thermal solution achieves very low temperatures of 67°C with the default BIOS and 72°C with the Turbo BIOS—both lower than many competing cards. Fan noise levels are higher, though. With 35 dBA and 37 dBA, they are sitting right next to the Founders Edition's 36 dBA. Given the low temperatures, I feel like Colorful could have used a slightly less aggressive fan curve. On the other hand, I hear a lot of gamers in the Asian markets favor low temperatures over fan noise, which could explain the fan settings. NVIDIA introduced idle fan stop on their Founders Edition cards with the GeForce RTX 30 series, which makes this capability a standard feature to have. The Colorful iGame RTX 3080 Vulcan will turn off its fans in idle, desktop work, Internet browsing, and light gaming for the perfect noise-free experience.

With the Vulcan, Colorful is including a small LCD monitor that's attached to the top edge of the graphics card, capable of displaying various important statistics, like frequencies and temperatures. The iGame Center software is required to send those stats to the LCD, though. The colors of the panel are crisp and the animations smooth, much better than other solutions we've seen in the past. You may customize which sensor values are displayed, with how much delay between them and in which order. You may also choose between a "one value + chart" or "two values" display format, and can show off your own uploaded logo.

Power efficiency is comparable to the Founders Edition. Actually, it is a tiny bit better. This is the case with both the default and Turbo BIOS. While the default BIOS matches FE power consumption exactly, the Turbo BIOS is slightly more power hungry, but offers higher performance at the same time, which is a fair trade-off. Other vendors increase the voltage for their factory overclock or compromise on the VRM design, which negatively affects power efficiency, not a problem with the Colorful iGame RTX 3080 Vulcan OC.

Overclocking on our sample with the default BIOS worked similarly to other RTX 3080 cards: gains are limited because the board power limit will cap the frequencies you can achieve. That's also a big drawback of the default BIOS. Its manual adjustment power limit is set to 340 W, which is 30 W below the Founders Edition—strange. With the Turbo BIOS on the other hand, OC yielded excellent results because it lets you set a 400 W power limit, which is higher than most other RTX 3080 cards I've tested. At 400 W, overclocking potential was the best of all RTX 3080 cards so far: 7.8%, which is really close to what the stock RTX 3090 can achieve, at much higher pricing. I still feel the Vulcan OC could handle much more power, its 22+4 VRM configuration is stronger than on any other card. Colorful maybe can release an optional XOC BIOS with an even higher power limit, similar to what EVGA has been doing with their FTW3.

Colorful is asking $880 for the iGame RTX 3080 Vulcan OC, which is a steep $180 premium over the Founders Edition. No doubt, the big cooler, much better VRM circuitry, and LCD display cost money, but I still find it too expensive. The factory overclock can justify a few percent, but not 20%. ASUS is asking $850 for the STRIX, EVGA wants $810 for the FTW3 Ultra, and the AORUS Master is $850. A price point much closer to $800 would definitely help the Vulcan, but at this time, all RTX 3080s everywhere are sold out, and people are willing to pay much much more, so my pricing considerations really don't matter.