Introduction: Gigabyte back in the day pretty much created the 3 fan cooler style with their Windforce design; now it's widely accepted and used across all brands. I firmly believe this is Gigabytes best implementation yet and I will go into detail on how good the cooler really is later on. The appearance of the Gigabyte cards this generation is polarizing for sure. I have spent time on the forums and the sub-reddits, Gigabyte's design is certainly not a crowd pleaser. I on the other hand rank it among the best looking cards this generation. It's unique angular lines stands out just enough, yet can blend in with most builds. Looks are certainly subjective.
Out of the Box: The stock configuration of the card is solid. The Gigabyte gaming OC will consistently boost to 1980 MHz, then settle around 1967 MHz for the duration of the gaming session. I never experienced the launch driver, only the driver that reportedly "fixed" crashing; this driver has never let the card spike above 2000 MHz. In a standard case setup of 2 front intake, 1 rear exhaust, temperature hoovers in the 64 to 66 C range, never breaking 70 C, not even once. The fans are also inaudible over the other case fans, which are all Noctua locked at 1200 rpm. I cannot find anything to complain about with the stock configuration, short of the one nit-pick below.
Gigabyte's fan profile is overall a solid implementation. My one small quibble is that the zero fan feature stops all fans below 60 C. When temperature increases at the start of a gaming session, fans begin spinning once the 60 C thresh hold is crossed. After a gaming session ends, when the temperature falls below 60 C, the fans again come to a full stop. My quibble is that the card then hovers in the 50 C range for a very long time. The passive cooling from the case fans is not enough to pull the temperature back down to 30 C. I noticed the card was hot to the touch 20+ minutes after gaming only to see the temps still above 50 C. I did set up a custom fan profile in MSI Afterburner to have the zero stop feature set at 35 C instead and that solved the issue. Now the card will fall below 35 C, the fans full stop, and temperatures will stay in the low 30 C and sometimes below with no intervention from the fans needed.
Overclocking: This card comes with a healthy overclock out of the box. You really cannot push it any further. You could possibly get another 50 Mhz on the core, but that would only net a single frame in real games, simply not worth it. I believe the bottleneck to be the locked voltage. Gigabyte was unfairly caught up in the "Capacitor Gate" scandal, being grouped in with vendors using sub-par PCB designs. This was found to be untrue. Gigabyte has arguably the best capacitor layout of any card. Gigabyte overspec'd the reference design by more than double. Reference PCB design called for six 210 SP caps, Gigabyte used six 440 SP caps; which is significantly higher capacitance than even the six banks of MLCC used on the ASUS Tuff cards; which also had crashing issues. The issue was never the capacitors, but rather a driver issue that Nvidia has since fixed.
Under-volting: Where this card really shines is under-volting. Using MSI Afterburner, I was able to reduce the overall voltage by 150 mv without hurting performance. At stock, the card hovers in the 1 volt (1000 mv) range. I could set the voltage to peak at 850 mv and the card will still boost to 1947 MHz, just 20 MHz below stock. The upside is that this undervolt shaves another 10 C off the temperature. The card now sits around 54 to 56 C during long gaming sessions, with no noticeable loss in performance. There are some handy guides on the inner-webs if you would like to attempt the same with your card.
In-Conclusion: The Gigabyte Gaming OC is a terrific version of the RTX 3080. The cooler design is among the best available, the PCB is over-built, it looks sharp, and comes with a 4 year warranty when registered within 30 days of purchase. The only knock is its inability to over-clock beyond what came from the factory. For me, this isn't a huge factor as most variants of the 3080, regardless of the manufacturer, are all in the same boat. None have any significant ability in that regard.
If you found my in-depth review helpful, please press that button and consider following me for other tech related reviews.
| Memory Speed | 19000 MHz |
|---|---|
| Graphics Coprocessor | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
