Introduction

We have with us the Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3080 iGame Vulcan OC graphics card. Over the past decade, we've come to expect nothing less than the most over the top custom-design cards from Colorful, and the company doesn't disappoint with its premium RTX 3080 "Ampere" offering. The Colorful Vulcan OC features the most elaborate cooling solution we've seen for an RTX 3080 so far, along with a very generous board electrical design and features you'd expect when paying the kind of monies the RTX 3080 demands. It's also designed for those who intend to push the RTX 3080 to the limit with serious overclocking because of the generous power-limit adjustment range.

The GeForce RTX 3080 "Ampere" is NVIDIA's latest flagship graphics card despite the fact that it sells the slightly faster RTX 3090 under the same GeForce brand. This is because the RTX 3080 is designed to provide 4K Ultra HD AAA gaming with RTX enabled, while the RTX 3090 with its 24 GB of memory provides more of an uplift over the RTX 3080 to creators than gamers. The "Ampere" graphics architecture is designed by NVIDIA to provide not just significantly higher performance than RTX 20-series "Turing," but also nearly double the performance of the GTX 10-series "Pascal," making it an ideal upgrade opportunity. An area of engineering focus also appears to be the significantly increased raytracing performance.



The GeForce "Ampere" architecture heralds NVIDIA's second generation of RTX, the groundbreaking real-time raytracing technology that sees the combination of conventional raster 3D graphics with raytraced elements, so the hybrid still looks generations ahead of conventional graphics. Raytracing adds realism to lighting, shadows, reflections, ambient occlusion, global illumination, and, with "Ampere," even raytraced motion blur, which is very difficult to pull off in real time and was hence relegated to a post-processing effect. 2nd Generation RTX is a combination of new "Ampere" CUDA cores, which offer concurrent FP32+INT32 operations, new 2nd Generation RT cores that in addition to increased performance have fixed function-hardware for newer real-time ray-tracing effects, and the 3rd Generation Tensor core, which leverages the sparsity phenomenon in deep-learning neural nets to increase AI inference performance by an order of magnitude. NVIDIA leverages AI for denoising its raytracing pipeline, and for its DLSS performance-enhancement feature.

The GeForce RTX 3080 is based on the same "GA102" silicon as the RTX 3090, the largest GeForce "Ampere" silicon. It has more than double the SIMD muscle as its predecessor, the RTX 2080, with a staggering 8,704 CUDA cores, 68 RT cores, 272 tensor cores, 272 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. To ensure a steady stream of data to these, the company sought to significantly increase the memory bandwidth by opting not just for 10 GB of memory across a 320-bit wide memory interface, but innovating a whole new memory standard—GDDR6X, which ticks at a blistering 19 Gbps, working out to 760 GB/s of memory bandwidth—70% higher than the RTX 2080. The "GA102" silicon is built on the new 8 nm silicon fabrication process at Samsung and takes advantage of the new PCI-Express 4.0 x16 bus standard—next gen in every way.

The Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3080 iGame Vulcan OC supercharges the RTX 3080 with a powerful 26-phase VRM setup that pulls power from three 8-pin PCIe inputs and gives the card significantly increased power limits over the NVIDIA Founders Edition card. Cooling the beast is a massive triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution that features two aluminium fin stacks connected to a vapor-chamber plate and heat pipes. The cooler also features a really cool LCD display that can be configured to display hardware monitoring, or graphics. Its backplate is functional, using flattened heat pipes that spread heat better. By default, the card runs at a rated 1710 MHz boost, with the stock power limit of 320 W, which basically gets you RTX 3080 FE performance. The card does offer a dual-BIOS feature, with the second "Turbo" BIOS ticking at 1800 MHz boost with a 370 W limit—one of the highest for RTX 3080. Colorful is asking $880 (a $180 premium) for the iGame Vulcan OC. In this review, we put it through its paces.

Packaging

The Card

I like the design language of the iGame Vulcan; with a mix of various shades of gray and silver, it doesn't look too busy, but gets that gamer theme across. On the back, you'll find a high-quality metal backplate.


Dimensions of the card are 31 x 14.5 cm.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and one HDMI 2.1. Interestingly, the USB-C port for VR headsets, which NVIDIA introduced on Turing Founders Editions, has been removed—guess it didn't take off as planned. The DisplayPort 1.4a outputs support Display Stream Compression (DSC) 1.2a, which lets you connect 4K displays at 120 Hz and 8K displays at 60 Hz. Ampere can drive two 8K displays at 60 Hz with just one cable per display.

Here, you can also see the large "Turbo" button, which lets you switch between the default BIOS and the Turbo BIOS. The default BIOS runs at NVIDIA reference settings: 1710 MHz boost with a 320 W power limit. The Turbo BIOS runs at 1800 MHz boost and a 370 W power limit, a significant increase. The fan curve is a bit more aggressive on the Turbo BIOS, and both BIOSes have fan stop.

Ampere is the first GPU to support HDMI 2.1, which increases bandwidth to 48 Gbps to support higher resolutions, like 4K144 and 8K30, with a single cable. With DSC, this goes up to 4K240 and 8K120. NVIDIA's new NVENC/NVDEC video engine is optimized to handle video tasks with minimal CPU load. The highlight here is added support for AV1 decode. Just like on Turing, you may also decode MPEG-2, VC1, VP8, VP9, H.264, and H.265 natively, at up to 8K@12-bit.

The encoder is identical to Turing. It supports H.264, H.265 and lossless at up to 8K@10-bit.


Unlike the NVIDIA Founders Edition card that introduces the new 12-pin power input, Colorful sticks to industry standard 8-pin PCIe power inputs, but there are three of them. Combined with PCIe slot power, this configuration is rated for 525 W.


A unique selling point of the Colorful iGame Vulcan OC is this 480x128 pixel LCD display, which can be flipped to make it visible when your card is mounted vertically.


Using Colorful's iGame Center software, you may display various sensors readings on the LCD, which look great. What I really like is that you can choose between a single-sensor mode, which shows a chart on the right side, and a side-by-side view, which displays two sensor values at the same time.

You may also upload your own picture with text. When the iGame Center software is not running, the LCD will display an animated Vulcan logo.


Near the back of the card, you'll find two pin headers. The first is to provide an RGB signal to other components, so they can be synced with the graphics card RGB. The second lets you connect a USB-C cable from your system to the graphics card, so you can upload images to the LCD monitor. I think it should also be able to charge your smartphone, but it won't provide any data connectivity.


The GeForce RTX 3080 does not support SLI. Its bigger brother, the RTX 3090, has SLI support. As both are based on the GA102 GPU, it's purely a segmentation choice. Multi-GPU really isn't supported widely anymore, so it's no big deal.

Teardown

Colorful's heatsink uses a vapor-chamber base paired with six heatpipes to keep the card cool. You can also see a lot of thermal pads that provide cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry. The mounting system is very well thought out; there is no sagging or other movement, the whole card feels like one solid piece.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling. Note the integrated heatpipes, which add a little bit of extra cooling. You can also see the lighting panel for the RGB functionality.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles or forum posts.



High-res versions are also available (front, back).