Palit GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming Pro Review – Reasonable Entry into the NVIDIA Upper Class

With the Palit GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming Pro, Palit’s “butter-and-bread” Ampere card has also been in the trade since the launch, or rather should be. The manufacturer is not responsible for the availability. In contrast to the slim Founders Edition, Palit has opted for the more bulky 2.5-slot design and is putting a card on the shelves that also offers a good compromise between performance and cost. Does this work and where has the cost minimization been successful? Today’s test provides the answers.

First of all, a few key data about the GA102 chip used. The heart of this card is the GA102-200 graphics processor. It is based on Samsung’s 8nm process node designed specifically for NVIDIA and has a total of 28 billion transistors. It measures just under 628 mm², which makes it the second largest gaming GPU ever produced directly under the Turing TU102 GPU. The new shader cores of the Ampere architecture are 2.7x faster, the new RT cores 1.7x faster, while the new Tensor cores are up to 2.7x faster than their counterparts on Turing GPUs. The RT core of the 2nd. The 3rd generation also delivers dedicated hardware-accelerated ray tracing performance and offers twice the intersection of rays/triangles while providing RT graphics and arithmetic operations.

For the GeForce RTX 3080, NVIDIA has enabled a total of 68 SM units on its flagship, resulting in a total of 8704 CUDA cores. In addition to CUDA cores, NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3080 is also equipped with next-generation RT cores (ray tracing), Tensor cores, and brand new SM or streaming multiprocessor units. In terms of memory, the GeForce RTX 3080 is equipped with 10GB of GDDR6X memory that can deliver memory speeds of 19.0Gbps. Together with a 320 bit interface this will provide a cumulative bandwidth of 760 Gbps.

The Palit GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming Pr
o

The case of the card is dominated by plastic, and there are also various proportions of light metal and other materials, which haptically is still okay and at least catches the eye a bit optically. The design with the 5.3 cm installation depth and the 4 mm backplate makes this card a real 2.5 slot design with all known advantages and disadvantages. You can love it or hate it, but it doesn’t scare off in the form of this graphics card, the power comes from fuel, as is well known, and it has to be dissipated as waste heat.

With its 1184 grams, the card is significantly lighter than the 1352 grams Founders Edition, but optionally even offers a separate holder for the card in the scope of delivery. The length of 29.2 cm is already a bit below the average of the customs, whereas the rather moderate installation height of only 10.5 cm from the upper edge of the PCIe slot with an installed card to the top of the cover is nothing that should scare a case. The funny 12-pin Micro-Fit 3.0 on the top side was replaced by two normal 8-pin sockets, the cooler was also cut out at this point to match. The usual RGB lighting system is not available on the top side, but in the front behind the propellers.

On the one hand, the back shows two threaded inserts for optional attachment to a suitable graphics card stand or bracket, the rest is a completely closed event with closed curtains.

Palit, like NVIDIA, does without the USB Type C on the slot panel, probably also because the VR hype has cooled down considerably in the meantime. Interestingly, AMD will re-record this feature on Big Navi, while it seems to have already finished here. The HDMI 2.1 connection should not be missing, and of course the three current DisplayPorts. The large cooling openings show that it could (and will) become quite warm.

The data in the BIOS is slightly above that of the Founders Edition, but with the same power limit. We already know the 1440 MHz base and the 1740 MHz boost clock is 30 MHz above the values of the Founders Edition. The rest like the 1188 MHz memory clock and the memory expansion with 10 GB at the 320 bit interface are then again identical. In direct comparison to the other new cards, the RTX 3080 with the 3090 is at the top end of the food chain and the performance-related distance of the 699 euro card to the 1499 euro expensive GeForce RTX 3090 is significantly smaller than the price difference.

Here I also have a table for all statisticians among you, before it really gets going on the next page.

Test system and evaluation software

The benchmark system is new and is now no longer in the laboratory, but back in the editing room. I now also rely on PCIe 4.0, the matching X570 motherboard in the form of a MSI MEG X570 Godlike and a selected Ryzen 9 3900XT, which is water cooled and overclocked up to 4.5 GHz. In addition, there is the matching DDR4 3600 RAM from G.SKILL in the form of the TridentZ Neo, as well as several fast NVMe SSDs. For direct logging during all games and applications I use NVIDIA’s PCAD, which increases the comfort tremendously.

The measurement of power consumption and other things takes place here in the special laboratory on a redundant and identical in every detail test system then double-tracked using high-resolution oscillograph technology…

…and the self-created, MCU-based measurement setup for motherboards graphics cards (pictures below), where in the end the thermographic infrared images are also taken with a high-resolution industrial camera in an air-conditioned room. The audio measurements take place outside in my chamber.

I have also summarized the individual components of the test system in tabular form: