Introduction

The EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Ultra is the company's premium offering based on NVIDIA's swanky new RTX 3080 Ti graphics card, which the company hopes will restore its leadership in the high-end gaming graphics segment that felt disputed by the Radeon RX 6900 XT. Along with its sibling, the RTX 3070 Ti, the new graphics cards are a response to AMD's return to competitiveness in the high-end graphics segment. It has the same mission as the RTX 3080—to offer maxed out gaming at 4K Ultra HD resolution with raytracing, making it NVIDIA's new flagship gaming product. The RTX 3090 is still positioned higher, but with its 24 GB memory, is branded as a TITAN-like halo product capable of certain professional-visualization applications when paired with NVIDIA's Studio drivers.



The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti features a lot more CUDA cores than the RTX 3080—10,240 vs. 8,796, and maxes out the 384-bit wide memory interface of the GA102 silicon, much like the RTX 3090. The memory amount, however, is 12 GB, and runs at 19 Gbps data-rate. The RTX 3080 Ti is based on the Ampere graphics architecture, which debuts the 2nd generation of NVIDIA's path-breaking RTX real-time raytracing technology. It combines new 3rd generation Tensor cores that leverage the sparsity phenomenon to accelerate AI inference performance by an order of magnitude over the previous gen; new 2nd generation RT cores which support even more hardware-accelerated raytracing effects; and the new faster Ampere CUDA core.

The EVGA RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Ultra features the same top-tier iCX3 cooling solution as the top-tier RTX 3090 FTW3, with a smart cooling solution that relies on several onboard thermal sensors on top of what the GPU and memory come with, a meaty heatsink ventilated by a trio of fans, and plenty of RGB LED lighting to add life to your high-end gaming PC build. The PCB has several air guides that let airflow from the fans pass through, improving ventilation. EVGA is pricing the RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Ultra at $1400, a pretty premium over the $1,200 baseline price of the RTX 3080 Ti.

Packaging

The Card

The EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Ultra features a top-class design with a "lacy" backplate that's functional, in that exhaust from the heatsink comes out through punched-in holes across the PCB.


The card measures 30 cm x 14 cm, weighing 1590 g.


Installation requires two 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 the 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.

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.


This switch lets you select either the "OC" and "Normal" BIOSes.


The card puts out its own A-RGB and auxiliary 4-pin PWM fan headers, letting you synchronize additional cooling and lighting with the card.


Unlike the NVIDIA Founders Edition card that introduces the new 12-pin power input, EVGA sticks to the 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. At reference specifications, the RTX 3090 is already shipping with 350 W typical board power, which maxes out the power draw of two 8-pin connectors and begins to feed heavily on the PCIe slot. The third 8-pin input, which adds 150 W, is hence definitely needed for this card to have any meaningful power headroom.


The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti does not support SLI.

Teardown

EVGA's heatsink uses a copper baseplate to spread the heat and six heatpipes that quickly move the heat away from the GPU.


Here, you can see the six 8-mm-thick heatpipes converging at the copper base-plate.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.

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, videos or forum posts.



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