Packaging

The Card

The Gainward Phantom GS is dominated by black. I like the shiny metal "pipe" that runs along the wrong side of the card if it were to function as a heatpipe. On the other side you'll find a high-quality metal backplate.


Gainward has an RGB illuminated element in the front cooler.


Dimensions of the card are 33.0 x 14.5 cm, and it weighs 1997 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).

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.


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

Teardown

Gainward's card uses a very large thermal solution. The baseplate soaks up heat from the GPU quickly and moves it through eight 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.