Gigabyte Aorus GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Extreme
Performance first and foremost.
If you want a card to show off to the world, you won’t find many better options than the Aorus 3080 Ti Extreme. It takes up four slots, it’s fast, it dwarfs almost every other graphics card, it’s got RGB, an OLED screen, a PCB for overclocking and no less than six display outputs. It’s certainly a card with the lot.
The Aorus 3080 Ti Extreme includes everything plus the kitchen sink. It needs to be held in your hand or compared to another 3080 Ti to get a gauge on how truly big this card is. It’s one of few cards to come with no less than six display outputs. These are 3x DP 1.4a, two HDMI 2.1 and a single HDMI 2.0 port. The side LCD panel is customisable and allows you to show real time monitoring info or custom text and GIFs. It’s powered by three 8-pin power connectors, it has dual BIOS and lovely RGB lighting. Deciding whether to mount it vertically or horizontally will present you with a tough choice.
Gigabyte clearly decided to build the 3080 Ti Extreme without compromise. The four-slot cooler will rule it out of the majority of compact builds. The triple fan cooler has a lot of surface area. We expected it be exceptionally quiet but actually it proved to be the loudest of the 3080 Ti’s we tested. It’s not an obtrusive level of noise compared to the insanity of old-style blower coolers, but we had hope for a little bit better acoustic performance. Much like the Aorus 3070 Ti Master, the shroud may be trapping in some excess heat.
The Aorus Extreme was easily the fastest of the 3080 Tis we tested. It averaged a stunning 1,915MHz over our looping test and it did so with an amazing low peak temperature of just 68c. But there’s a tradeoff. The cards’ fans spin up to very high levels, reaching 81 percent! At this speed the card is clearly audible, but even at this speed the card cannot be considered obtrusive. This performance comes at the cost of very high power consumption of over 400w. That’s the highest we’ve seen from any graphics card we’ve tested to date. If you want maximum performance, the Aorus is the card to get, but we think the power consumption and noise levels are a step too far.
Enabling the quiet BIOS saved about 10w in power and a produced a slightly lower fan speed but provided no other significant difference. It might be one of the few occasions where we’d recommend setting a flagship card to its secondary ‘quiet’ BIOS.
The Aorus Extreme is unabashedly a premium card. It demands to be shown off in a windowed case and it should only be matched with a similarly high-spec system. The Aorus might be the Lamborghini of 3080 Ti cards, but at its list pricing at the time of writing it offers surprisingly good value (if that’s even remotely possible for a $3,000+ GPU); it’s cheaper than the Asus TUF and not much more than the Zotac, but it’s not perfect. If noise levels and high power consumption don’t concern you or you’re prepared to play around with custom fans curves, then the Aorus Extreme is a stunning flagship Ampere graphics card.
Gorgeous looks, a long feature list and class leading performance make this a 3080 Ti to lust after. It’s relatively good value too.