Packaging

The Card

The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition uses the same cooler as the RTX 3080. You have one fan on each side of the card, with the fan on the left sucking air in from the bottom of the case and routing and exhausting it through the slot-cover opening. The second fan sucks air in from below and pushes it out above the card—near the CPU cooler, where a case fan is usually installed to exhaust the warm air. Visually, the card looks amazing, with an almost iPhone-like clean design of matte and shiny metal surfaces.


Dimensions of the card are 29 x 11 cm, and it weighs 1364 g.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and one HDMI 2.1. 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.


Just like the RTX 3080, and other Ampere cards, the RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition uses the NVIDIA 12-pin power connector. It's basically a much more compact solution to provide a lot of power for the card. The 12-pin carries up to 300 W of power, the equivalent of two 8-pin PCIe power cables. Total available power is 375 W (300 W from the 12-pin + 75 W from the PCIe slot). With every Founders Edition, NVIDIA includes a 2x 8-pin to 12-pin adapter cable, so you're good to go and don't need any special adapters.

Unfortunately, NVIDIA has placed it in the middle of the card, which makes the life of case modders more difficult because cleanly routing the cable won't be easy.


The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti does not support SLI.

Teardown

I'll spare you all the disassembly details as they are exactly the same as for the RTX 3080. Find our detailed step-by-step guide here.


NVIDIA's Ampere Founders Edition cooler design is a technological marvel. It's extremely well engineered and very compact, yet still easy to maintain.


NVIDIA's cooler uses a large vapor chamber base paired with four heatpipes. A 85 mm fan is installed on each side.


The thermal pads on the back of the cooler are 1.3 mm thick, and the thermal pads for memory and VRM on the front are 1.5 mm thick.