Packaging

The Card

The EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Ultra features a top-class design with a "lacy" backplate that's functional, in that exhaust from the heatsink comes out through punched-in holes across the PCB.


The card measures 30 cm x 14 cm, weighing 1590 g.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and one HDMI 2.1. Interestingly, the USB-C port for VR headsets, which NVIDIA introduced on the Turing Founders Editions, has been removed—guess it didn't take off as planned. The DisplayPort 1.4a outputs support Display Stream Compression (DSC) 1.2a, which lets you connect 4K displays at 120 Hz and 8K displays at 60 Hz. Ampere can drive two 8K displays at 60 Hz with just one cable per display.

Ampere is the first GPU to support HDMI 2.1, which increases bandwidth to 48 Gbps to support higher resolutions, like 4K144 and 8K30, with a single cable. With DSC, this goes up to 4K240 and 8K120. NVIDIA's new NVENC/NVDEC video engine is optimized to handle video tasks with minimal CPU load. The highlight here is added support for AV1 decode. Just like on Turing, you may also decode MPEG-2, VC1, VP8, VP9, H.264, and H.265 natively, at up to 8K@12-bit.

The encoder is identical to Turing. It supports H.264, H.265, and lossless at up to 8K@10-bit.


This switch lets you select either the "OC" and "Normal" BIOSes.


The card puts out its own A-RGB and auxiliary 4-pin PWM fan headers, letting you synchronize additional cooling and lighting with the card.


Unlike the NVIDIA Founders Edition card that introduces the new 12-pin power input, EVGA sticks to the industry standard 8-pin PCIe power inputs, but there are three of them. Combined with PCIe slot power, this configuration is rated for 525 W. At reference specifications, the RTX 3090 is already shipping with 350 W typical board power, which maxes out the power draw of two 8-pin connectors and begins to feed heavily on the PCIe slot. The third 8-pin input, which adds 150 W, is hence definitely needed for this card to have any meaningful power headroom.


The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti does not support SLI.

Teardown

EVGA's heatsink uses a copper baseplate to spread the heat and six heatpipes that quickly move the heat away from the GPU.


Here, you can see the six 8-mm-thick heatpipes converging at the copper base-plate.


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