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, and it weighs 1217 g.


Installation requires three 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.


The card draws power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors. This configuration is rated for 375 W.


The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti does not support SLI.

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.


Six 8 mm-thick heatpipes pull heat from a baseplate that makes touches the GPU and memory. The thermal pads for the memory are 2.0 mm thick, the VRM pads are 1.0 mm, and the pad on the back are 1.6 mm thick.


Palit includes a metal backplate with the RTX 3080 Gaming Pro OC. Thermal pads pull some 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.