ZOTAC GAMING RTX 3080 Trinity Graphics Card Review
Peter Donnell / 4 years ago
How Much Does It Cost?
The ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 3080 Trinity is one of the more affordable RTX 3080 cards launching this week. It’s an MSRP card, which basically means its the base model. Obviously, it’s not completely basic, as it does have a nice cooler design, but the specifications are not unlike the founder’s cards. Unfortunately, the stock is hard to pin down at the moment, so I’ll just leave a generic Amazon link for you to check stock and prices, but we’ll update this again as the dust settles. You can check prices here.
Overview
The ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 3080 Trinity looks like it has gotten a bit of an unfair trial here today. It’s the slowest RTX 3080 we’ve tested, which makes it seem like the worst, and that’s honestly an unfair assessment. We didn’t get a founders edition card for launch, but we did start off with the VERY powerful and more expensive Gaming X Trio from MSI, and that was followed with the even more powerful TUF Gaming from ASUS. The Zotac card is more affordable and has more standard RTX 3080 clocks, so it was never going to compete with those.
Power
Without a doubt though, this is still one of the fastest gaming GPUs on the market today. While it may have been behind the other two in some tests, it was matching them in others. Furthermore, when I saw it was behind, I don’t mean by much, we’re talking a frame or two in some cases. Of course, when you look at the 1080 Ti hitting 66 FPS at 4K in Wolfenstein, the RTX 2080 SUPER hit 100 FPS, and the flagship AUROS RTX 2080 Ti 128 FPS, this card managed a whopping 158 FPS. It’s a mighty upgrade.
Build Quality
It’s not quite as fancy looking as some of the cards out there, but honestly, it’s not bad looking either. A funky looking cooler, three huge fans with ZERO RPM modes, blacked out PCIe bracket, a large backplate, and a subtle dose of RGB. For an MSRP card, I think they’re giving you some great value for money with all those features. It feels robust, and there’s a big heavy heatsink to keep things cool. Overall, it’s pretty decent.
Should I Buy One?
There are more powerful RTX 3080 cards out there, but honestly, not THAT much more powerful. You can be paying north of £100 more for some of the (subjectively) better-looking cards, or ones that have more robust hardware, but again, it’s what do you really want/need from your GPU? The Zotac has a good range of features and very competitive performance at an even more competitive price.
