Introduction

The Palit GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming Pro OC is the company's premium RTX 3080 Ampere product, targeted at 4K UHD high-end gaming PC builds with the right balance of bling and practicality. This is one of the few custom-design cards we have with us in this review that sticks to the standard full height. The Gaming Pro OC board design involves a chunky triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution with copious amounts of metal and minimal use of RGB bling. Its designers also made clever use of its length to ensure one of the three fans vents completely through the card, which is not unlike NVIDIA's Founders Edition card with its Dual Axial Flow-Through cooler.

The GeForce RTX 3080 Ampere is NVIDIA's new-generation flagship consumer graphics card, designed to bring 4K UHD gaming with raytracing turned on to a three-figure price-point. It also offers 1440p and 1080p high refresh-rate gameplay with RTX on. The new Ampere graphics architecture represents the 2nd generation NVIDIA RTX, the company's bold new effort to bring real-time raytracing to the consumer segment by combining conventional raster 3D graphics with raytraced components, such as lighting, shadow, reflections, ambient occlusion, and global illumination. This results in visuals that go above and beyond what raster graphics are capable of, while being true to life.



NVIDIA's 2nd generation RTX introduced with Ampere consists of a new double-throughput CUDA core design that performs concurrent FP32+INT32 math operations; the new 2nd generation RT core that handles the bulk of the BVH traversal and intersection workloads of RTX, which now comes with fixed function temporal hardware that makes even more RTX effects possible, including raytraced motion blur. The new 3rd generation tensor core shares many similarities with the tensor cores at the heart of the A100 Tensor Core processor, leveraging the sparsity phenomenon in deep-learning neural nets to accelerate AI inference performance by an order of magnitude.

NVIDIA has doubled the SIMD horsepower of the RTX 3080 over its predecessor, the RTX 2080, with a staggering 8,704 CUDA cores, 68 RT cores, 272 tensor cores, 272 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. To keep all this compute muscle fed, NVIDIA has also significantly upgraded the memory—10 GB of new GDDR6X memory ticking at 19 Gbps, over a 320-bit wide memory interface, working out to 760 GB/s of bandwidth, a 70% increase over the previous generation. The new "GA102" silicon at the heart of the RTX 3080 is built on a new 8 nm silicon fabrication process Samsung designed specially for NVIDIA. The card also takes advantage of PCI-Express 4.0 x16, ready for new-generation desktop platforms.

The Palit GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming Pro OC builds on NVIDIA's accomplished Founders Edition design by combining a premium PCB with a capable-looking cooling solution that uses a pair of large aluminium fin stacks ventilated by a pair of fans. The card is longer than the PCB itself, so nearly a third of the card's airflow goes through, venting upwards, just like with the Founders Edition cooler. The card ships with a mild factory overclock of 1740 MHz GPU Boost (compared to 1710 MHz reference), while the memory is left untouched. Palit hasn't revealed its pricing to us yet. We are assuming that it will be $710, a $10 premium.

Packaging

The Card

The Palit GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming Pro OC is a conventional-looking triple-fan, triple-slot graphics card with a few interesting design bits. A metal front-plate scaffolds some of the fans, although in a nice way. Since the card sticks to the standard full height, compatibility with some of the narrower cases is assured. The backplate is punched through towards the end to let airflow from the third fan through.


Dimensions of the card are 29.5 x 11.5 cm.


Installation requires three 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 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.


The card makes do with a pair of conventional 8-pin PCIe power inputs. This configuration is rated for 375 W.


The GeForce RTX 3080 does not support SLI. Its bigger brother, the RTX 3090, has SLI support. As both are based on the GA102 GPU, it's purely a segmentation choice. Multi-GPU really isn't supported widely anymore, so it's no big deal.

Teardown

Disassembling the Palit RTX 3080 Gaming Pro OC is straightforward—no guitar picks needed. You simply undo a bunch of screws to remove the backplate and then turn a second set of screws to pull out the cooling solution. The cooler comes out in one clean piece, leaving behind the PCB. There's no baseplate, but the cooling solution makes contact with all hot components on the PCB, including all the MOSFETs and memory chips.


Palit included a metal backplate with the RTX 3080 Gaming Pro OC. Thermal pads pull come of the heat from the rear of the PCB. Punched-in holes let airflow from the third fan go through. Palit took this concept a step further by fattening the fin-stack towards the tail-end of the card since there's no PCB in the way.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles or forum posts.



High-res versions are also available (front, back).