The Asus TUF Gaming RTX 3080 OC, as its name suggests, is the first factory-overclocked version of Nvidia's new GPU to pass my test bench, but definitely not the last. And it's a bit of a monster, not only in terms of making 4K games a breakfast in the morning, but also on the general scale. The cooler is huge, the circuit board the GPU is on is huge, bigger than any RTX 3080 we've seen.

Huge, is what I would say.

The new Nvidia RTX 3080 is a powerful graphics card in all its incarnations. The flagship gaming GPU of the Ampere generation is the silicon that makes 4K gaming a genuine reality, and more than that, it truly enables real-time ray tracing without the tasteless performance sacrifices that plagued the original RTX 20 series.

And while the Founders Edition of Nvidia's new GPUs is quite special in its own right, unlike tradition, third-party graphics card manufacturers like Asus can ship overclocked and reference cards on the day of release They are able to do so. Normally, one would wait a month or so for factory overclocked cards, but Nvidia has loosened the reins, perhaps to get as many RTX 3080 cards as possible on the virtual shelves.

Still, that's not enough to make the cards available to everyone who wants them, Founders or not, and shady resellers on Ebay are trying to snag them and resell them for exorbitant prices. Thankfully, the public, retailers, and Nvidia itself are trying "everything humanly possible" to reduce such nonsense.

Still, cards like the Asus TUF Gaming RTX 3080 OC are nominally available at launch and may return to stock as soon as possible. But is the overclocked version the best bet compared to Nvidia's excellent Founders Edition, which only comes at a relatively small premium to Asus' TUF cards, and this OC edition has a sticker price of $750 (£720) FE It offers a boost clock of 1,815 MHz versus the card's rated boost of 1,710 MHz. [Traditional overclocking cards never offer more than 100MHz OC right out of the box, so the Asus RTX 3080 should be more attractive than the reference-clocked versions shipped from Nvidia's skunkworks. [Asus has also tuned the cooler in a new way to reduce turbulence caused by the triple-fan design and having three large fans next to each other. The center fan spins in opposite directions, which looks a bit odd, but anecdotally it seems to work. In other words, this TUF Gaming card is the coolest of the four RTX 3080 cards I have tested so far.

The vast heat sinks under the all-metal shroud also clearly do the trick. In addition, the heatsink is designed to run 10GB of GDDR6X at temperatures well below maximum operating specs, and Asus describes this new, rugged TUF design as an attempt to create an "old faithful" graphics card, a flagship product that just keeps running and running. Asus states.

Indeed, I didn't notice any problems with the card, and that's not true of all the overclocked versions that hit the test bench. Also, my experience overclocking the Founders Edition shows that it is not easy to get stable cores when tweaking the clock.

Asus' RTX 3080 is cooler, higher-clocked, and sometimes delivers higher gaming performance in our series of benchmarks. But when it comes to the RTX 3080, I am still Team Founders Edition: there are games and resolutions where the FE card provides slightly higher frame rates, and there are games where the TUF Gaming RTX 3080 wins. In many cases, however, it is only a difference that can be explained as an acceptable variation within the test.

How is this possible, you might ask? Most of this is due to the quality of FE's engineering, not to the performance of Asus' card itself. Nvidia's RTX 3080 uses a custom PCB design that is not used in third-party cards. Asus has created its own custom PCB for this card. created, and it is huge. In fact, none of the RTX 3080 cards I've seen so far have PCBs with a similar layout, which is going to make it difficult for folks like EKWB who are trying to make a widely compatible water block.

However, FE's bespoke design means that despite a boost clock of only 1,710MHz, it averages around 1,817MHz in my long-run tests. Thanks to enhanced cooling and the higher initial clock speed of the Asus RTX 3080, FE still leads in frequency, but only averaged 1,839MHz in the long Metro Exodus 4K test. This explains the similar frame rate levels despite the overclocked cards.

The effectiveness of the Nvidia RTX 3080 Founders Edition design really shows in the power consumption comparison. Peak power consumption is 368W and average power consumption is 324W. The Asus card, however, consumes 399W peak and 347W average.

But if we are talking about high-end discrete graphics cards, we are not looking at the most environmentally friendly gaming PC setups to begin with. Few people care about the amount of power a GPU consumes when they are getting this kind of performance. [And the RTX 3080 is still the best graphics card available today in any form. It's certainly not cheap, nor is it vaguely affordable, but we need to take another look back at its performance relative to the previous generation's $1,200 RTX 2080 Ti. The RTX 3080 is much faster and much cheaper, and the RTX 2080 Ti is the best graphics card on the market today. The gap with the similarly priced RTX 2080 Super is only widening.

Therefore, the Asus TUF Gaming RTX 3080 OC Edition will not sway me to recommend waiting for the Founders Edition to restock, but you will definitely not lose by choosing this powerful card instead. However, you get nothing for the premium of the OC Edition.