ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 3080 Graphics Card Review
Peter Donnell / 4 years ago
A Closer Look
The first things you notice about this card when you pick it up is that it’s massive and it’s heavy. The cooler is simply enormous, and the fact it uses a metal shroud does add plenty of weight its self. However, it also feels robust, strong and well… TUF!
The fans are stunning, all using their axial-tech design, which is basically that ring that goes all the way around the edge and the fact the centre fan spins in the opposite direction to the other two. It drives even more air down into the heat sink, improving cooling performance.
The fans all have their high-quality dual ball bearing design, and all fans can drop to zero RPM when temperatures are below 55c. Pretty impressive, but such a big heatsink gives you a lot of passive cooling power.
The card is a little on the thick side, coming in at 2.7 slots, so basically triple-slot, as you can’t really use 0.3 of a slot for something else. However, all that extra heatsink space is going to be handy. The card has a two-section heatsink for the GPU, but also a triple heatsink and heatpipe arrow to cool the VRM. The card has been given TUF Gaming MOSFETS and, a more durable PCB, higher quality capacitors and more, so it makes sense they’d go the extra mile to make sure it’s all optimally cooled.
Want some RGB in your life? There’s a little lightbar above the TUF Gaming logo here, which looks awesome. I love the multi-texture design of the shroud too, it looks rather futuristic and also very stylish.
The card draws power from just two 8-pin headers, which is amazing given the size of the card. A card this size a few years ago you would expect 3x or 4x power connectors, but new chipsets are also more efficient too.
The rear of the card is quite busy too, with a very functional backplate providing added strength and cooling to the PCB. There’s also a bridge here that links in the main heatsink and allows some airflow out the rear of the card. It’s clear this thing is built for raw performance, but damn does it look good too!
Finally, at the rear of the card, you’ll find triple DisplayPorts, and double HDMI ports. A nice change, as typically you only get one HDMI port these days.
