Introduction

The Palit GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GamingPro is the company's premium custom-design RTX 3080 Ti offering, letting gamers who know what to expect from this GPU simply install and get gaming. Within Palit's product stack, the GamingPro is positioned a notch below its coveted GameRock brand for enthusiasts. By itself, the RTX 3080 Ti is NVIDIA's new flagship gaming graphics product, replacing the RTX 3080 from this distinction. The RTX 3090 is marketed as a halo product, with its large video memory even targeting certain professional use cases. The RTX 3080 Ti has the same mandate as the RTX 3080—to offer leadership gaming performance at 4K UHD with maxed out settings and raytracing.



The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti story likely begins with AMD's unexpected return to the high-end graphics segment with its Radeon RX 6800 series and RX 6900 XT "Big Navi" graphics cards. The RX 6900 XT in particular has managed to outclass the RTX 3080 in several scenarios, and with its "XTXH" bin, even trades blows with the RTX 3090. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti NVIDIA developed is to fill exactly this performance gap between the two top Amperes—the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090.

The RTX 3080 Ti is based on the same 8 nm GA102 GPU as the other two top cards from NVIDIA's lineup, but features many more CUDA cores than the RTX 3080, at 10,240 vs. 8,704, and, more importantly, maxes out the 384-bit wide memory bus of this silicon. NVIDIA endowed this card with 12 GB of memory. Other key specifications include 320 Tensor cores, 80 RT cores, 320 TMUs, and 112 ROPs. The memory ticks at the same 19 Gbps data-rate as the RTX 3080, but the wider memory bus means that the total bandwidth has increased to 912 GB/s.

Palit adds value to the RTX 3080 Ti by pairing it with its TurboFan 3.0 triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution that has plenty of RGB bling to satiate gamers. The cooler is longer than the PCB itself, so airflow from the third fan goes through the card and out holes punched into the metal backplate. The card runs at reference clock speeds of 1665 MHz and is officially priced at the NVIDIA $1200 baselines price for the RTX 3080 Ti, making it more affordable than the other custom designs we're testing today. In this review, we tell you if this card is all you need if you have your eyes on an RTX 3080 Ti.

Packaging

The Card

The Palit GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming Pro OC is a conventional-looking triple-fan, triple-slot graphics card with a few interesting design bits. A metal front plate scaffolds some of the fans, although in a nice way. Since the card sticks to the standard full height, compatibility with some of the narrower cases is assured. The backplate is punched through towards the end to let airflow from the third fan through.


Dimensions of the card are 29.5 x 11.5 cm, and it weighs 1217 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and one HDMI 2.1. 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.


The card draws power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors. This configuration is rated for 375 W.


The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti does not support SLI.

Teardown

Disassembling the Palit RTX 3080 Gaming Pro OC is straightforward—no guitar picks needed. You simply undo a bunch of screws to remove the backplate and then turn a second set of screws to pull out the cooling solution. The cooler comes out in one clean piece, leaving behind the PCB. There's no baseplate, but the cooling solution makes contact with all hot components on the PCB, including all the MOSFETs and memory chips.


Six 8 mm-thick heatpipes pull heat from a baseplate that makes touches the GPU and memory. The thermal pads for the memory are 2.0 mm thick, the VRM pads are 1.0 mm, and the pad on the back are 1.6 mm thick.


Palit includes a metal backplate with the RTX 3080 Gaming Pro OC. Thermal pads pull some of the heat from the rear of the PCB. Punched-in holes let airflow from the third fan go through. Palit took this concept a step further by fattening the fin-stack towards the tail-end of the card since there's no PCB in the way.

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).