EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Ultra review: Pure souped-up power - willardwhavence

Brad Chacos/IDG

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Fantabulous 4K and 1440p gambling
Huge factory overclock
Atomic number 3 fast as RTX 3090, sometimes quicker
12GB of high-speed GDDR6X memory
Loaded with overclocking-friendly features
Fan and RGB headers, striking RGB lights
Precision X1 software is superb

Cons

Impressive power draw
Massive size, 3x power pins limits some PC compatibility
EVGA's fantastic cooler delivers but very good heat, noise results due to sky-high power draw
Very valuable (more so on the street), low-lying availability

Our Verdict

The EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Titanium FTW3 Ultra is an extremist-fast, power-chugging graphics card built to ride the haemorrhage-march of carrying out—if you can give it. Overclocking enthusiasts and gamers who refuse to ritual killing a undivided frame will love it, but most people would live better off with a more affordable option.

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The new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is basically a 3090, but for gamers, we aforesaid in our review of Nvidia's Founders Edition pose. The GPU inside is barely cut-down, and while the RTX 3080 Ti gets half the memory of its bigger sib, 12GB of GDDR6X is confident of handling even the most extreme 4K gaming workloads. It's just the thinnest of hairs slower than the 3090 in games. "This is the GeForce card that deep-pocketed gamers should buy," we aforesaid.

If you're looking at for a suitable hot rod to theater that sensational-fast GPU, look no further than EVGA's RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Ultra. This big, feature-load flagship tames the RTX 3080 Ti in shipway that Nvidia's dual-slot Founders Edition simply can't. The FE placard is almost As fast as the GeForce RTX 3090, yes. Only the EVGA FTW3 Ultra is good as fast as an RTX 3090 thanks to its hefty overclock and abundant cooling. At $1,400, you're paying a $200 premium for the supernumerary fierceness on top of the 3080 Ti's enthusiastically free-base terms. Viewed through other genus Lens, the EVGA RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Ultra is an extremely high-quality custom graphics card that goes squared-toe-to-toe with baseline RTX 3090 models for $100 inferior.

You know, if artwork card prices weren't outrageously inflated even more right now. This carte is selling for between $1,700 and $1,900 on Ebay at the time of writing this reappraisal. Sigh. Disregardless, the FTW3 Ultra rocks. Army of the Righteou's dig in.

EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Ultra specs, intent, and features

The EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Si FTW3 Ultra holds no surprises. It features the equivalent core GPU as every Nvidia RTX 3080 Si, but tames it with the company's spectacular high-end FTW3 custom chilling and design, which we've already down loving with in the Ultra versions of the EVGA RTX 3080 FTW3 and RTX 3070 FTW3. This is a spectacular graphics card.

Let's kick things off with a refresher happening the RTX 3080 Ti's midway specifications, compared to its send predecessor:

…and so take a peek at EVGA's specification sheet for the FTW3 Immoderate specifically:

Most of the details align perfectly, every bit you'd bear. You find the same number of CUDA, irradiatio tracing, and tensor cores in both the FTW3 Ultra and the Nvidia Founders Version modelling, along with the same 12GB of ultra-fast GDDR6X remembering that can handle any play tasks tangled at it with ease. (We covered GDDR6X's advancements and Nvidia's fres "International ampere" GPU design in-profundity in our new GeForce RTX 3080 FE inspection.) Both also feature the New "Lite Hash Rate" anti-mining technology that nerfs the production of Ethereum cryptocoins on every freshly made Nvidia GeForce GPU besides the RTX 3090.

There's one solid difference betwixt Nvidia and EVGA's card game: clock speeds. While the GPU used in Nvidia's Founders Edition model stuck to credit 1.67GHz boost speeds, EVGA pushed clocks whol the manner equal to 1.8GHz in the fierce FTW3 Ultra. Interestingly, EVGA still calls for the duplicate 750-watt power supply required for the Founders Edition. As you'll see in our powerfulness benchmarks later, the faster speeds result in significantly higher zip usage for this identity card—well more than even the RTX 3090 draws. Plan on choosing a bigger magnate supply just to be harmless. The FTW3 Ultra requires a trio of 8-trap power connectors, up from the Founders Version's duo, to labor even more power into the circuit card during overclocking attempts.

Not that you need to overclock it. EVGA pushes this already-coercive GPU so hard that even the extravagant FTW3 Extremist tradition cooler can barely control information technology. While the 3070 and 3080 versions of the FTW3 Ultra ran untold cooler and quieter than their Nvidia Founders Variation counterparts, the RTX 3080 Titanium FTW3 Extremist actually runs a bit warmer than the FE despite its heftier ternion-slot design and abundant fans. IT sounds about the same in natural process.

Don River't let that dissuade you from the card, though. The FTW3 Ultra cooler cadaver fantastic; EVGA is simply using IT to push the RTX 3080 Ti beyond even the RTX 3090's performance. Driving that habitation, while any bespoken cards include a "Quiet" BIOS switch or els, EVGA instead fitted out the FTW3 Extremist's substitute BIOS with an "OC" visibility that disables the card's stagnate fan stop lineament and raises fan speeds to pass on you extra overclocking headroom.

evga rtx 3080 ti ftw3 ultra 9 — The dual-BIOS switching with a secondary OC profile sits to the left of the scorecard's trio of 8-pin power connectors.

The company's GPU management computer software, Precision X1, remains best-in-class. It lets tinkerers push performance even far with granular overclocking features and the ability to raise the power limit even promote. Precision X1 also lets you hydrant into the not uncomparable, not two, justnine"iCX3" sensors that EVGA embedded throughout the card, letting you see temperature readings for different parts of your GPU, remembering, and voltage regulation systems. Information technology clay a killer exclusive boast for art carte du jour nerds and hind end help you livelihood an plane closer eye on your overclocking endeavors.

Speaking of which, EVGA's entire high-end cooling design revolves around iCX like a sho. Here's an excerpt from our RTX 3080 FTW3 Ultra revue; the technical details remain applicable for the 3080 Ti FTW3, too.

"The RTX 3080 [Ti] FTW3 Ultra features three large endorsement-contemporaries "HDB" fans in its wavy shroud. Their asynchronous control lets each fan respond independently to the effective temperature conditions inside your bill, pulling data from those iCX sensors. Better yet, they South Korean won't spin any if your GPU temperatures are under 55 degrees Celsius, so you'll enjoy silent, passively cooled operation during common desktop usage. EVGA also offset the center fan by 10mm, which the company claims helps to "increase the direct airflow area by 16 percent."

"There's so plenty of metal for that broadcast to cool down. EVGA slapped an absolutely massive heatsink on this triple-slot card. It's infused with "180-degree" semi-throwaway heatpipes that EVGA says increases inter-group communication area aside 65 per centum, and bolstered past a large, unified copper occlusion helping to prevent some the GPU and memory cool. EVGA says it redesigned the heatsink to allow free-flying to act more freely throughout, then compatible that with cut-outs in the custom PCB and atomic number 13 backplate to let air flow through the card (perhaps in a nod to the Founders Edition's unparalleled flow-finished design)."

evga rtx 3080 ti ftw3 ultra 8 — The ARGB and PWM headers sit at the rear of the FTW3 Ultra.

"…EVGA too equipped the FTW3 Radical with a PWM winnow header on the end of the placard. You bottom plug one of your case's PWM fans into it and have the fan be intelligently contained past the graphics card's temperature directly, rather than by your motherboard. Cards like the similarly high-end Asus ROG Strix have offered this before, and it proves especially handy if you apply your card to control a front grammatical case fan pointed directly at the GPU. Following to the fan header, you'll find an ARGB header that you can plug into your motherboard to tie it together with your graphics bill's chosen lighting."

Considering the iCX sensors, dual-BIOS switch, ARGB and PWM headers, and (of course) abundant customizable lighting embedded in the scorecard's tack, the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Ultra includes pretty much every luxurious extra you could ask for—a really good thing in a $1,400+ graphics circuit board.

But just how fast can information technology go with entirely that heavy metal? Let's engage it to the essa terrace.

Next page: Our mental testing system of rules, benchmarks begin

Our test system

We're victimization our new AMD Ryzen 5000-series test rig to benchmark the EVGA RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Radical. Currently, we'rhenium testing it on an open bench with AMD's Wraith Max ventilate tank. In the future, we'll glucinium moving the setup into a suit and adding an NZXT Kraken unfrozen cooler to the unify. Most of the ironware was provided by the manufacturers, but we purchased the storage ourselves.

AMD Ryzen 5900X, timeworn settings
AMD Wraith Max cooler
MSI Godlike X570 motherboard
32GB G.Accomplishment Trident Z Neo DDR4 3800 memory
EVGA 1200W SuperNova P2 power supply ($352 happening Amazon)
1TB SK Hynix Gold S31 SSD

We'Re comparing the $1,400 EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Ultra against the Nvidia's Founders Edition models of the $1,500 RTX 3090, $1,200 RTX 3080 Ti, and $700 RTX 3080, of course, besides as AMD's rival $1,000 Radeon RX 6900 XT.

Time constraints prevented us from testing Resizable Legal community or ray tracing public presentation. That said, because the 3080 Ti is essentially a 3090 with less memory, its ray trace and DLSS performance should be very near monovular to that card's. You can catch how the comparison GPUs all handle ray tracing in our Radeon RX 6900 XT review.

This evaluation focuses purely along time-honored gaming benchmarks. We mental testing a assortment of games spanning various engines, genres, vendor sponsorships (Nvidia, AMD, and Intel), and graphics APIs (DirectX 11, DX12, and Vulkan). Each game is tested using its in-game benchmark at the highest feasible graphics presets unless otherwise noted, with VSync, frame rate caps, real-prison term ray tracing operating theatre DLSS effects, and FreeSync/G-Synchronize disabled, along with any other marketer-specific technologies wish FidelityFX tools surgery Nvidia Involuntary. We've besides enabled temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) to crusade these cards to their limits. We hunt down each benchmark at least three times and list the average result for each test.

Because the RTX 3080 Ti is a known quantity at this point, we'll allow all comment for the end. But pay close attention to where the FTW3 Extremist falls in these charts. While the RTX 3090, 3080 Cordyline terminalis FE, and 3080 Ti FTW3 Radical all deliver roughly confusable results, on that point are several scenarios where EVGA's card meets or even beats the flagship 3090. Wowza. You couldn't say that approximately Nvidia's 3080 Ti Founders Edition.

Gaming execution benchmarks

Watch Dogs: Horde

Watch Dogs: Legionis one of the first games to debut connected next-gen consoles. Ubisoft upgraded its Disrupt engine to include cutting-edge features ilk real-sentence ray trace and Nvidia's DLSS. We disable those effects for this testing, butHost clay a strenuous game even on high-finish hardware with its facultative high-resolution texture pack installed. No card can assert a 60-frames-per-second average with Ultra graphics options enabled, and the game allocates more than 8GB of memory even at 1440p. Oof.

Horizon Zero Sunup

Yep, PlayStation exclusives are coming to the PC now.Horizon Zero Aurora runs on Irregular Games' Decima engine, the equal engine that powersDeath Stranding.

Next page: gaming benchmarks continue

Gears Tactics

Gears Tactics puts information technology ain brutal, fast-paced spin happening theXCOM-like genre. This Unreal Engine 4-powered game was improved from the ground prepared for DirectX 12, and we love being capable to work a tactic-style game into our benchmarking suite. Better yet, the game comes with a superfluity of graphics options for PC snobs. More games should commit so much loving care to explaining what flipping entirely these visual knobs mean.

You can't economic consumption the presets to bench markGears Tactics, as IT intelligently scales to work superfine happening your installed hardware, meaning that "Ultra" on one art card behind load different settings than "Ultra" on a weaker card. We manually set all options to their highest accomplishable settings.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is many fun when you can play cooperatively with a buddy, but it's a fearless experimentation—and an absolute field showcase. Operative along the Vulkan API,Youngblood achieves blistering ensnare rates, and it supports all sorts of keen-edge technologies like ray tracing, DLSS 2.0, HDR, GPU culling, allochronic computing, and Nvidia's Content Adaptive Shading. The game includes a built-in benchmark with two different scenes; we prove Riverbank.

Underground Exodus

One of the C. H. Best games of 2019,Subway system Hegiraremains nonpareil of the best-looking games around, too. The latest adaptation of the 4A Engine provides incredibly luscious, ultra-careful visuals, with one of the most disorienting real-time ray trace implementations discharged yet. The Extreme artwork predetermined we benchmark hind end melt even the most powerful modern hardware, as you'll take care downstairs, though the game's Ultra and High presets stock-still look practiced at much higher chassis rates.

We test in DirectX 12 mood with shaft of light tracing, Hairworks, and DLSS disabled.

Borderlands 3

Borderlands is back up! Gearbox's game defaults to DX12, so we do also. It gives us a coup d'oeil at the ultra-popular Unreal Locomotive 4's carrying into action in a traditional shooter. This halting tends to favor AMD hardware.

Strange Brigade

Strange Brigade is a cooperative one-third-person shooter where a team of adventurers blasts through hordes of mythic enemies. It's a technological showcase, made-up around the next-gen Vulkan and DirectX 12 technologies and infused with features care HDR support and the ability to on/off switch asynchronous compute on and off. It uses Rebellion's custom Azure engine. We test using the Vulkan renderer, which is faster than DX12.

Side by side page: gaming benchmarks extend

Total State of war: Troy

The up-to-the-minute game in the touristedTotal War saga,Troywas given away free for its first 24 hours along the Verse form Games Store, moving over 7.5 million copies before it went happening proper sale.Entire Warfare: Troy is shapely using a modified version of theTotal War: Warhammer 2 railway locomotive, and this DX11 title looks stunning for a turn-based strategy biz. We test the to a greater extent intensive combat bench mark.

F1 2020

The latest in a long line of fortunate racing games,F1 2020is a gem to quiz, supplying a wide align of both in writing and benchmarking options, making it a much more reliable (and fun) option that theForzaserial publication. It's well-stacked on the in vogue version of Codemasters' buttery-smooth Ego gage locomotive, discharge with support for DX12 and Nvidia's DLSS technology. We psychometric test two laps on the Australia course, with clear skies along and DLSS off.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Grave Raider concludes the reboot trilogy, and it's still deadgorgeous a couple of eld after its debut. Square Enix optimized this unfit for DX12 and recommends DX11 only when you're using older ironware or Windows 7, then we test with DX12.Shadow of the Grave Freeboote uses an enhanced translation of the Foundation engine that likewise poweredAcclivity of the Grave Plunderer and includes optional time period ray tracing and DLSS features.

Rainbow Six Siege

Rainbow Sextuplet Beleaguering still dominates the Steam charts years after its launch, and Ubisoft supports IT with frequent updates and events. The developers have poured a ton of mold into the game's AnvilNext engine over the years, eventually reverberating out a Vulkan version of the game that we expend to test. By default, the game lowers the render scaling to increase frame rates, just we set it to 100 pct to bench mark native rendering performance on graphics cards. Even still, frame rates soar.

Next page: King, thermals, and noise

Power draw, thermals, and noise

We trial run power draw aside looping theF1 2020 benchmark at 4K for about 20 proceedings after we've benchmarked everything else and noting the highest reading on our Isaac Watts Up Affirmative measure, which measures the force consumption of our entire test organization. The initial part of the race, where all competitory cars are onscreen simultaneously, tends to be the most demanding portion.

This isn't a worst-case test; this is a GPU-bound game running at a GPU-bound resolution to gauge performance when the graphics placard is sweating hard. If you're playing a game that also hammers the CPU, you could see higher overall system power draws. Deliberate yourself warned.

The RTX 3080 Ti and 3090 Founders Edition models take up similar top executive levels, which makes sense, as the RTX 3080 Ti's reference specs au fond make it a faster-clocked 3090 with half the GDDR6X memory. But putting the bike to the metal to surpass the 3090 requires significantly much juice. The FTW3 Ultra consumes 100 watts more than power under freight than both of Nvidia's cards. Oof. That said, if you're investment in an radical-fast, built-for-overclocking hot rod of a GPU like this, power levels probably aren't your primary concern. EVGA was wise to throw efficiency concerns out the window in my opinion.

We psychometric test thermals away leaving GPU-Z open during theF1 2020 powerfulness pull test, noting the highest level bes temperature at the end.

Here's the counterpoint to that: Sucking down a lot more ability throws slay a wad more heat too. EVGA's massive, fantastic custom cooling resolution keeps the FTW3 Ultra on a par with the RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition in heat and noise even with its massive overclock. That substance precise nifty, but not great, results here. If you wanted a quieter, cooler custom RTX 3080 Ti, you could to be sure find one—but it wouldn't push execution Eastern Samoa hard as the FTW3 Ultra. Pick your poison.

Side by side page: Should you buy the EVGA RTX 3080 Atomic number 2 FTW3 Ultra?

Should you buy the EVGA RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Extremist?

We've said it in all nontextual matter card limited review we've publicized this yr, and we'll say it again: You probably shouldn't buyanygraphics card redress now. Prices are slowly starting to do down, but still remain flat-impossible cockeyed during the crippling GPU shortage. I'd advocate most people baby-sit on the sidelines and stream their Personal computer games via Nvidia's GeForce Now service until the dust settles. Spell this batting order ostensibly costs $1,400—already a princely sum—it's going for $1,700 to $1,900 on the streets. That's much than Young Brad's first several hooptie cars combined.

Near people wear't need this level of firepower, either. The non-Atomic number 2 GeForce RTX 3080 delivers exceptional 4K and 1440p gaming execution for (ostensibly, once again) half the price of the FTW3 Ultra. You're salaried double as much for frame rates that are lonesome 10 to 15 pct faster. Cost-to-performance becomes seriously come out of the closet of wack over here at the luxurious end of artwork cards.

All that aforementioned—and it needs to be said—Bugattis live for a reason. Approximately people simply necessitate peak performance, price be damned. If you're a gamer with deeply pockets and a thirst for complete speed, the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Cordyline terminalis FTW3 Ultra was built to squelch it. This radical-luxe artwork calling card meets or beats the RTX 3090's play performance out of the corner for $100 inferior than the flagship's baseline price, just it comes utterly pixilated with thoughtful extra features—like the iCX sensors, dual-BIOS switch, ARGB and PWM headers, and Precison X1 software—that can help overclockers push the ironware to summit performance with ease. To that end, EVGA cockeyed the FTW3 Ultra with a unselfish 400W power limit—50W more than the Nvidia Founders Variation. You can manually increase it by another 50W for even more headroom. Forthwithyou'Ra playing with power!

Dynamical the foot pedal to the gold comes with some tradeoffs. The FTW3 Immoderate is physically massive, draws a truly staggering amount of index, and its heat and noise levels are simply good, not particular. But muscleman cars always guzzle gas and run hot to achieve their impressive performance, and EVGA's graphics circuit board is zero other. Those potential "drawbacks" aren't drawbacks whatsoever for the sort of person who would buy this card.

IT's also worth noting that EVGA's customer serving reputation is nothing squabby of astral. The company drove that home with its behavior around the RTX 30-series launch, creating the industriousness's first queue system for graphics card buyers and eradicating the cherry "lips" elements on the ends of its GPUs that proved aesthetically divisive. Stellar customer service should be a given when you're buying hardware this high-closing, but that's sadly not often the case.

The EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Te FTW3 Ultra isn't for everyone—farther from it. But if you're connected the hunt for pure mightiness and have a go at it to monkey around with your ironware to nutcase the HP to the bleeding edge of possible performance, it'll be hard to ascertain a more complete and compelling graphics circuit card than this. Highly recommended…if you fall into that spirited 1 percent.

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Brad Chacos spends his days digging through desktop PCs and tweeting also overmuch.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/394887/evga-geforce-rtx-3080-ti-ftw3-ultra-review-pure-souped-up-power.html

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