ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 OC, TUF-RTX3080-O10G-GAMING, 10GB GDDR6X, 2x HDMI, 3x DP

Nvidia bietet mit der Ampere-basierten RTX 3080 einen deutlich größeren Leistungssprung als noch beim letzten Generationswechsel von Pascal zu Turing. Das Custom-Modell von Asus beeindruckt mit einer hochwertigen Verarbeitung und einer effektiven sowie leisen Kühlung – das Gesamtpaket stimmt.

Viele Monate nach dem Start der Geforce RTX 3080 ist die Verfügbarkeit weiter angespannt. In PCGH 03/2021 haben wir trotzdem verschiedene Designs verglichen, damit Sie beim richtigen Modell zugreifen - wenn die Zeit kommt. Eine der getesteten Karten ist die Asus TUF Gaming O10G Geforce RTX 3080.

Wer noch mit Karten der 1000er Serie unterwegs ist, sollte dringend über ein Update nachdenken. Wenn es ein Modell der RTX 3080 sein soll, ist man mit der ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 3080 OC Series dank der hochwertigen Komponenten und Verarbeitung sicherlich gut beraten.

Eigentlich sollte uns die ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 OC schon deutlich früher erreichen, aber aus verschiedenen Gründen hat sie es zum Start nicht zu uns geschafft. Es deutet sich inzwischen an, dass dieses Modell mit zu den besten gehören könnte, welches neben den "Einsteiger-Karten" ab 699 Euro zu einem vernünftigen Preis zu haben ist. Es ist also Zeit für uns diese Mutmaßungen zu untersuchen.

Mit Asus GeForce RTX 3080 TUF und MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio stellen sich die ersten Custom-Designs der Founders Edition im Test. Ihr Vorteil gegenüber Nvidias Variante ist der leisere Betrieb, bei der Leistung tut sich hingegen wenig. Die klassischen 3-Lüfter-Kühlsysteme verlangen allerdings nach Platz.

Asus has done an excellent job with the TUF Gaming RTX 3080 OC, it’s a great quality graphics card and better than Nvidia’s own Founders Edition in every measurable way. It’s quieter, significantly cooler, faster out of the box and best of all, it doesn’t require a silly 12-pin power adapter or specialized cable.

You receive a product that will be dominant in that Ultra HD space. Your games average out anywhere from 60 to 100+ FPS, well aside from Flight Simulator 2020. Dropping down in resolutions does create other challenges; you'll be far less GPU bound, but then again, we do not expect you to purchase a GeForce RTX 3080 and play games in 1920x1080. Arbitrarily speaking, starting at a monitor 2560x1440 resolution, that's the domain where the GeForce RTX 3080 will start to shine. The raw shading/rasterizer (read a normal rendered game) performance is staggering as this many shader cores really make a difference. The new generational architecture tweaks for Raytracing and Tensor also is significant. Coming from the RTX 2080, the RTX 3080 exhibited a roughly 85% performance increase, and that is going to bring hybrid raytracing towards higher resolutions. DXR will still remain to be massively demanding of course, but when you can plat Battlefield V iN ultra HD with Raytracing and DLSS enabled at over 70 FPS, hey, I'm cool with that. Also, CUDA compute performance in Blender and V-Ray, OMG! Where is the extra performance coming from you might wonder? Well, the turbo frequency remains more or less the same. The memory runs reference 19 Gbps. The slightly increased gaming clock isn't going change things either; these days it is all about how much power a GU is allowed to consume. ASUS applied an increased power limitation (5%), e.g. it may consume more energy in return for extra performance. That combined brings in the extra 3~4% compared to reference performance. Performance-wise the TUF Gaming will be a tiny notch faster compared to reference thanks to the slightly higher memory clock. It overclocked quite a bit more productive as well (compared to the founder). IT all will remain marginal for all AIB cards that we'll test, though. The performance for all cards we expect will be close to each other. That leaves design, cooling, and preference. Well, that a dual 8-pin power header. We cannot complain as to what this card brings to the table in terms of raw power, so in the end, it will be user choice, pricing, and brand interest that will set the base for your purchasing decision. I cannot help thinking though that the STRIX at a reasonable price would be the product to get. But we'll have to check that one out at a later stage.

Any time we use the word simple, or utilitarian, or anything along those lines, there's a tendency to read it in a pejorative manner. We definitely don't mean it that way with the ASUS RTX Strix TUF. There is a lot to be said for a product which follows the Ronseal ethos of doing precisely what it says on the tin. It's a meat and potatoes type graphics card, and that's nothing to get snooty about. For many people, cards like this are, even with the massive price cut Nvidia has implemented relative to its performance, right at the peak of their budget. If you can save a few quid by eschewing frippery but still get excellent cooling and gaming performance, then we're all in on that idea. The ASUS RTX 3080 OC TUF falls into the category of hardware which brings you all the performance, with no cooling compromises either, and yet doesn't bust the budget to achieve that. If this particular OC model is a tiny bit out of reach, then the vanilla one is forty quid cheaper and is the one we would suggest buying. Much like the conclusion you read earlier this week for the Nvidia Founders Edition the same applies to the ASUS RTX 3080 OC TUF. The performance is attention-grabbing, but that's all down to the 3080 core. No matter what we threw at it, the average frames per second were tremendous. This was true with every scenario, every game. You have to get into the insane realms of 8K Gears 5 to drag things down, even remotely, and given how it was only the RTX 2080 Ti that first made 4K 60FPS playable at high detail settings, it shows how obscenely powerful the Ampere range of cards is. Special credit has to go to Nvidia's reworked DLSS 2.0 AI upscaling solution, which not only makes the image look better in many scenarios but dramatically increases the frame rates too. It's a win-win scenario, and as anyone who has been involved in the hardware world - or just the world in general - will know, those things in combination are rarer than a politician with integrity. As for the ASUS itself, there is a reason that the TUF cards sell so well. That price, for a manufacturer card, is excellent and as you can see from our temperature graph, those three fans work beautifully, keeping the card cool even after the most tortuous test we can devise. Remember too that we run our graphics cards in a sealed case rather than an open testbed, so your results will be very similar. If you're not running the lunacy of an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X as your CPU, you might even have lower temperatures. The clock speeds bear this excellent thermal performance out too, boosting far beyond the clock speed ASUS list our OC model as having. Indeed we'd be tempted to save the forty quid and go with the regular model, because the Nvidia GPU Boost works so well, and clearly the cooler can handle some serious horsepower. The TUF is a well priced RTX 3080, but we think in reality the £649 card would be a better option and then just hit the Nvidia OC scanner button and get that performance for free.

GeForce RTX 3080 serves the needs of the gamer who wants lusty framerates at QHD and smooth gameplay at UHD with all the bells and whistles turned on, and it currently has no performance peer at the $699/£649 price point. Though eminently fast, Nvidia's decision to crank TDP to 320W brings challenges and opportunities in equal measure. The Founders Edition card sets a new bar for aesthetics and does well in thermals and acoustics, putting renewed pressure on add-in card partners to do more with limited scope for improvement. Asus duly takes on that challenge with the Strix and TUF cards. The TUF Gaming OC's enlarged form factor and 2.7-slot cooling deals easily with the board's elevated 340W TDP, offering superb temperatures and low-noise operation that's better than the FE on both fronts. Build quality is top-notch, the aesthetic restrained, and there's little to complain about once you realise that Asus doesn't go overboard with the price. At £689, the extra 75MHz out-the-box boost speed offers a frame or two extra in most titles, but there's not a whole heap extra silicon headroom to go faster still. Thoroughly reasonable on the value front for a mid-OC effort, we'd actually veer away from this model and choose the non-OC version that is identical in every way apart from the relatively small overclock, saving yourself £40 for investment in a triple-A title or two. Bottom line: the Asus GeForce RTX 3080 TUF Gaming OC is a Founders Edition-beating card without the usual overly steep price premium.

ASUS expects their RTX 3080 TUF Gaming OC to retail for $730, which is just a 4% cost increase—very reasonable. You get a much better cooler in return, and a small overclock out of the box, which alone can't justify the pricing though. I'd still buy the TUF, because I have plenty of space in my case for a triple-slot card, and low noise is very important to me. Adjustable RGB lighting might be the feature that will lure in others to prefer the card over the Founders Edition, which has just fixed white lighting. On the other hand, the clean understated looks of the Founders Edition will appeal to many, and it also comes at highly competitive pricing. You feel like the OC isn't big enough for you to justify the cost, but still want the TUF cooler? No problem, the TUF is also available without "OC", using the same PCB and cooler, for NVIDIA MSRP of $699. TUF Gaming is finally TUF.