- Now, unfortunately, I can't really tell you guys
any of the stuff that we may or may not know yet
about the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition,
because I'd be lying if I said that, uh,
it hasn't already been on a test bench.
But what I can do
is open up the box for you, real nice-styles.
This, my friends,
if you have yourself a cool
(cash register rings) 699 U.S. dollars,
is what will arrive in your homestead.
So let's take a quick look at it.
This is my first hands-on,
even though it actually feels
still slightly warm from Anthony
maybe, allegedly, playing around with it.
So let's start with...
Oh, fine. We'll do the unboxing thing.
Okay, so in here you've got a dual 8-pin.
There it is, 8-pin PCI Express power connectors
to single miniature 12-pin, that's really cool.
So the new 12-pin is actually smaller
than the old 8-pin, in spite of the fact
that it can carry significantly more power.
Well, that's pretty spicy.
Also, of course, if you've got a modular power supply,
you don't even need to use this.
You can get fresh, new cables
from your power supply manufacturer,
assuming that they've got support for it.
Also in here, a GeForce support guide.
What do you even put in these?
Quick Start? Look at this book, it's a novel.
Plug the thing into the thing,
plug the other thing into the thing, all right.
So some of the big features of RTX 3000 series
are, of course, NVIDIA's new Ampere architecture,
giving us better performance
in basically every meaningful way, from conventional games
to novel concepts like ray-traced lighting in games;
or machine learning to upsample,
rendering the game at a lower resolution
and then displaying it on a higher-resolution screen.
It's got 10 gigs of GDDR6X video memory,
which is a huge bandwidth boost over the previous GDDR6.
And one of the big ones here is, of course,
the extraordinarily unconventional cooler design.
So what we're used to seeing is your I/O at the back.
So you've got three DisplayPort and a single HDMI 2.1.
That's right, my friends, up to 8K resolution.
Right down here is the PCI Express Gen4 16x connector.
All that looks pretty normal so far.
Right up here is the SLI...
No.
No SLI. There'll be no SLI except on the RTX 3090.
NVIDIA's basically saying, well,
if you wanna go overkill,
you might as well go overkill putting what is
effectively the final nail in the coffin of SLI.
And then, in other unusual news,
we've got the fan on the back.
So this is pretty normal.
AMD has even done reference designs,
NVIDIA has done reference designs,
with fans blowing down towards the PCB like this
and then exhausting kinda out like this or out the back,
so you can see that right here.
We've never seen a full-on intake fan
on the back of the card.
And you know what?
Now that they've done it,
I guess it makes a ton of sense,
because if you can pull air in
right here, where the fresh air is actually
coming in from the front of the case...
No, I actually still don't understand why
they didn't just put the fan on this side.
Let me think about this for a minute.
The PCB is here, and it's actually shaped like this,
which is crazy town.
And then what they've gotta do is the GPU,
which is right around here,
they've actually gotta bend the heat pipes up and away,
so you can actually see them there.
So you can't put the fan on this side,
'cause the heat pipes have to be here.
So obviously you gotta put the fan over on this side
because you've got your cold air coming in here,
you've got your more conventional-style fan right here
that's just taking that cold air and blowing it
out the back of the card and then,
hmm, yeah, over here, a little bit,
so kinda out, like this way.
Okay, so you got that.
And then this one is actually
a super unconventional design.
So if you look at the design of the blades here,
it's totally different from this fan.
See that? Conventional fan spins like that, blows air down.
This fan spins like,
I believe it's like this, yes,
and pulls air up here,
so the graphics card is basically
hogging all the cool air coming into your case,
and then being like, "Hey, CPU? Guess what?
You're a lower priority for gaming,
so (sputters) here ya go."
Which might actually have an impact on some people's setups,
depending on how borderline they are.
But unless you're kinda pushing
your tower cooler to the limit
with an overclock or whatever the case may be,
I suspect you'll probably be okay.
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Andy was mentioning that there is some confusion
about whether this is a reference card.
Now, in the past it was quite common
to release sort of like a design guideline PCB.
Founders Edition cards have sort of been referred to
as reference cards interchangeably in the past,
with what made them a Founders versus a reference card
being the fancy aluminum cooler over the last few years.
But NVIDIA is making it very clear
that while this is a Founders card,
it is not a reference card,
and there's a separate reference card
that doesn't have this unusual shape.
Another thing that we wanted to discuss
is what this card could potentially mean
for small form factor enthusiasts,
because the unconventional layout,
what with the 45-degree-angled
12-pin power connector coming out here.
I guess the airflow design is pretty standard-ish?
I mean, it's all going this way,
which we're used to seeing,
right? - But like the hot air
got blocked by the sandwich layout.
- Yeah, okay.
That's true, actually.
So if you're using anything like a DAN case, for example,
then this airflow is gonna be completely blocked.
You'd have to have something more conventional
where it's right next to the cooler,
so anything that uses a PCI Express riser
to lay the card down flat, you're pretty much gonna be
stuck water cooling this puppy.
I'm actually really interested to see how
water cooling manufacturers approach this challenge.
So I'll be interested to see if they have
kinda like e-peen extension backplates on them
in order to make them look a little bit heftier
when they're installed.
- [Andy] The EK water block is only 23 centimeters long.
With that space you can pretty much fit
a DDC pump in your small form factor case.
- That's a design that I'd like to see:
a block for this card that's actually designed
with a DDC mount right off of the back of it
or something like that, so you could just have
the whole thing integrated in the space
where normally you would just have a graphics card.
Now, in terms of performance, I can't share
anything with you other than what NVIDIA's
already published on their website,
which is that they're saying
it's way faster than the RTX 2080
and even faster than the RTX 2080 Ti,
in spite of not even being the kingpin RTX 3000 card.
That's, of course, the RTX 3090,
which is more like a Titan replacement.
And I think that's all the time we have for today, folks,
because we gotta put this thing back on the test bench
so we can have our full performance review,
looking at not just performance, actually,
but also some of the new features, so DLSS 2.1,
which is their latest iteration of their upsampling,
as well as some of their NVIDIA Broadcast features,
which are supposed to make life easier for streamers.
And, of course, I'm really excited to check out
their low-latency Reflex technology and see if,
what, does it have an effect on image quality
in order to give you that better
click-to-photon response time?
We'll have to see if we can pick it up
and not drop it.
Make sure you're subscribed to ShortCircuit, by the way,
for more videos just like this one,
but hopefully with more depth
because we're not hamstrung by our performance embargo.
Feels good.
It's heavy, you know? Like...
You know, bow. You know.