Final Thoughts

For our definitive conclusion and verdict on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition, look out for our review, which goes live on September 14. If you want to learn more about the underlying GPU architecture, our Ampere Architecture article is for you. The GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition is a very unorthodox-looking graphics card. We've been seeing leaks of the design since early Summer, but those don't take away from the surprise of holding the finished product in hand. From a purely subjective and artistic standpoint, the new cooling solution looks very well put together, although you'll have to wait for our comprehensive review for temperature and noise numbers. Having seen several custom-design RTX 3080 cards from their product announcements, we have to say that the RTX 3080 Founders Edition is also very compelling aesthetically.

NVIDIA seeks to address certain fundamental challenges with cooling modern high-end GPUs using air-cooling solutions without blindly throwing more metal and fans at the problem. The card is about as long and tall as most older generation reference-design cards and runs at a typical board power of 320 W. The goal of this design is to keep the card running cool and acceptably quiet. NVIDIA made many interesting design choices with its cooling solution without making it too large. One of these involves making the PCB shorter than the card itself and maxing out the Z-height of the card for the second fin-stack heatsink that vents out from the backplate.

To help keep the PCB compact and accommodate a large GPU package, ten memory chips, and a massive 18-phase VRM, NVIDIA took the radical step of changing the power connector standard, replacing it with a new Molex 12-pin MicroFit 3.0 connector that saves a lot of space and can handle the job of two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. NVIDIA includes an adapter so your PSU works with the card, although the warranty terms surrounding the use of third-party adapters seem restrictive.

NVIDIA claims the RTX 3080 has what it takes to be its next "flagship" product, beating the RTX 2080 Ti and offering a generational leap over "Turing." Hard product only makes up half of what NVIDIA is offering. As we detailed in our architecture article, NVIDIA championed real-time raytracing with its RTX 20-series and now wants to keep a leadership position on the technology. The 2nd Generation RTX feature set not only meets the DirectX 12 Ultimate DXR capability, but exceeds "Ultimate" with new effects, such as raytraced motion blur. NVIDIA is improving its AI-powered DLSS image quality enhancement to make 8K gaming or 4K high refresh rate gaming possible. NVIDIA is preparing to launch the RTX 3080 at a "starting price" of $699, although that may not be the price of the Founders Edition card, but a suggestive baseline price.

All in all, we can't wait to present our performance, power, acoustic, and relative comparisons of the RTX 3080 Founders Edition. It's undeniably the best-looking NVIDIA card we've held so far and a massive departure from past NVIDIA designs that tried to catch up to partner designs. In this case, NVIDIA is setting an aesthetic bar for partners to reach. Whether the card's thermals and acoustics match up to the lofty design goals is something we'll see in our main review—if it does, Jen-Hsun Huang is confirmed to have a genius designer and master engineers on his payroll.

Update September 12: NVIDIA has changed the embargo for Founders Edition reviews to September 16th at 6 AM Pacific Time / 3 PM CEST.