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.
The new firmware changes everything. It deserves another review. It’s now one of the fastest out there.
What kind of new firmware?
When I first got the Zotac 3090 it was fine. Then suddenly new Nvidia drivers came out and every game was CTD. Spent quite a few days looking into why this was happening and came across a new firmware update for Zotac, totally by accident. The ‘readme’ that came with the firmware didn’t mention clock fixes or anything of the sort. I installed it anyway and it was like someone had turned a switch on, NO MORE CTD’s, and none since. This was roughly 6 weeks ago or slightly more. I am now hitting 2150Mhz, sometimes more, with an overclock, with a temp of max 71C. This new firmware has turned my 3090 into a beast with averages higher than Strix OC. I have all the clocks, temps, power etc logged for anyone that is interested. I do have VERY good cooling in my PC case though.
The firmware came with the latest version of Firestorm. Soon as I ran Firestorm, it asked me to update the cards firmware. 🙂
Oh. Does it makes the card perform better or worse?
Some measures less perf. than FE, some has really nice boost clocks with okay temps.
A hell of a lot faster than FE. I have +800 on the mem and + 150 on the core. It’s boosting at 2145Mhz at many times during gameplay with Far Cry New Dawn, on rare occasions it’s hitting 2200Mhz with an AVG of 110FPS Max Settings 4K. I have placed two 80mm fans on the backplate, pushing air away from it and my max temps are 57c. You can literally touch the backplate and it’s cool, the fans really work well this way. Blowing air onto the backplate reduces temps but only a little. Much better to have the fans pulling air away from the BP. If you need the log file to GPU Z, I will be happy to send to you as evidence. Roughly 6 weeks worth of logs. Spent weeks trying different methods of cooling and costing quite a bit and have gone from 71c to 57c. I have now purchased faster fans but yet to try them but will let you know the outcome. I am expecting roughly 50c. I have to build a metal frame for them etc so they look nice also.