Packaging

The Card

Gainward's cards comes with a complex industrial look on the main cooler, maybe reminding me a bit of alien structures in sci-fi movies. On the back you get a high-quality metal backplate, the front cooler shroud is made from plastic.


Gainward has integrated an RGB lighting element along the top edge and there's more lighting around the fans.


Dimensions of the card are 33.0 x 13.0 cm, and it weighs 1591 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system. Actually the card is 3.1 slots, so you should be able to fix a card right next to it if it's something small without a backplate.


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

NVIDIA introduced the concept of dual NVDEC and NVENC Codecs with the Ada Lovelace 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.

Right next to the power connector you find the ARGB header, which lets you sync the graphics card's lighting effects with the rest of your system.

Teardown

The cooler on the Phoenix GS uses eight heatpipes that move heat away quickly from the GPU surface. The main cooler 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.