Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsUpgrade time!
Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2022
I previously had a EVGA GTX 1660 Super in my system and this is such a huge upgrade. Last year during The Great GPU Shortage, I bought a 165hz/1440p monitor which was a small oversight as my GPU clearly couldn’t even handle my monitor. Fast forward to now, I recently got a pay bonus from work and was back in the computer component market after seeing that GPU prices had dropped significantly. I’m very content with the price I paid for this 3080. Now onto the GPU itself.
The negatives:
- It is quite the space heater. A factor might be that I temporarily moved my setup into my bedroom from the office/studio to accommodate a guest. I also have case fans manually set to 100%, so I might tinker with that a little bit. It raised the ambient temperature of my room by probably around 5-10 degrees Fahrenheit (yeah pretty bad).
- It’s a CHONKER. GPU sag may occur. I bought a bracket/riser after I received it, since I didn’t know how large it would be.
- Not really a negative, but please, please buy a PROPER power supply to support this card. I’ve heard horror stories.
The positives:
- The performance is awesome, I’m actually able to reach 165 fps + 1440p on most games if I tweak the settings a little bit. I’ve been playing Forza Horizon 5 a lot and I have it set to mostly the highest settings (there’s a driver bug with the game currently, no biggie, barely see any difference anyway) and I get over 140 fps on average.
- Ray-tracing! It’s a given but honestly, I only turn this on for non-competitive games and if I don’t mind being below my personal target of 120-144 fps.
- The noise! It’s been really quiet for the most part, but keep in mind that I previously said I had the case fans set to 100% so that’s probably drowning the GPU fans out. Your mileage may vary here.
- Streaming/recording! I really like NVENC. While my previous card also had NVENC, it could not keep up streaming while gaming. I also have a Ryzen 5 3600 (yes I know I’m slightly bottlenecking, I have heard this many times), and while that CPU is a beast, it just simply doesn’t like being put to the streaming/recording tasks solo when gaming. It needs it’s good ol’ GPU encoder friend.
- I’ve owned 3 EVGA cards now including this one, and they’ve all been reliable so far. EVGA gets a plus here for that.
In conclusion, get this card if you have the capable budget and/or you’re looking to get some massive upgrade gains. Like I said, I don’t have the best CPU to support this, but it’s been working great so far.
