Packaging

The Card

Zotac uses a metal cooler shroud paired with a metal backplate, which looks great. In terms of color theme, various shades of gray are used, and along the top edge, an RGB strip has been installed.


Dimensions of the card are 32 x 12.5 cm, and it weighs 1465 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4 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 has two 8-pin power inputs. This configuration is rated for up to 375 W of power draw.


GeForce RTX 3080 does not support SLI. Only the RTX 3090 has very limited SLI support.

Teardown

Zotac's large cooling solution uses seven heatpipes and a big heatsink. This main part of the cooler handles heat output from the memory chips, too.


Once the main heatsink has been removed, a secondary cooling plate becomes visible, which soaks up heat from the VRMs and provides anti-sag stability for the card.


The backplate is made out of thick metal; it's actually the best backplate I've seen in a long time. There's also some RGB lighting installed here, and thermal pads pick up a little bit of heat from the back of the PCB.