Gigabyte RTX 3080 Eagle OC Review

As one of the first third-party RTX 3080 cards to pass through our labs, the Gigabyte RTX 3080 Eagle OC has certainly impressed. Replacing the WindForce family, this new Eagle series appears to have the same focus on cost-effective graphics cards, with this RTX 3080 model hitting the shelves at £649, so you're not paying a price premium over the MSRP.

First of all, it's worth re-capping the gaming performance of this graphics card. Given the Eagle has a 45MHz rated clock speed advantage over Nvidia's Founders Edition, we weren't expecting to see any huge gains to our frame rates. In fact, at 1440p and 4K, the Eagle is just 2% faster on average.

Of course, being an RTX 3080, this still means performance is the best we have ever seen, and compared to the RTX 2080 Ti, this GPU is 35% faster at 4K. Up against the RTX 2080 Super, the difference is 62%, while the Eagle is 72% faster than the RTX 2080. In short, it is a beast of a gaming GPU.

Gigabyte's team has also done a very good job at designing a GPU that runs cool and quiet. We saw its GPU temperature peak at just 67C during our testing, and while we can't yet comment if this is better or worse than other custom cards, it's certainly a healthy reduction of 9C compared to the Founders Edition.

As for noise levels, we did record the Eagle about 1dBa louder than the Founders Edition, with total output at 40dBa. This is still pretty quiet, however, and I certainly don't see it as a big deal at all, particularly as there is plenty of thermal headroom to play around with a less aggressive fan curve. In terms of its out of the box behaviour though, the fan spun at 1680rpm, but it's still not a loud card at all.

Power draw has been bumped up by 20W compared to the Founders Edition, with a 340W power target. This brought total system power draw up to 475W in our testing, so if you have a 500W PSU it would definitely be time to upgrade.

Unfortunately, the extra power headroom didn't yield much benefit when overclocking, as it seems Ampere is already right at its limits. We saw 3-4% gains from our best overclock, so I suppose it is something, but gone are the days when an extra 10% performance (or more) could be gained from an overclock.

All told then, the Gigabyte RTX 3080 Eagle OC is a very solid card, without any glaring weaknesses. It may not offer any innovative new features, or radical improvements over the Founders Edition… but it's not trying to. It's simply a decent card that will get the job done, and do it well, while also coming in at MSRP. Some gamers may want to pay a little more for a card with more bells and whistles, but for many I imagine this would be pretty much perfect. If you want the performance of an RTX 3080 without paying any price premium for it, then the Eagle is a fantastic option.

You can buy this card for £649.99 from Overclockers UK HERE.

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Pros

• Colour-neutral design.
• Slightly faster than Founders Edition.
• Priced at MSRP, or £649.
• GPU temperatures stayed below 70C at all times.
• Two HDMI 2.1 ports, instead of just one.

Cons

• Limited overclocking headroom.
• Very slightly higher noise levels than the Founders Edition.

KitGuru says: The Eagle has landed. If you're looking for a third-party RTX 3080 that's still priced at MSRP, the Gigabyte Eagle is an excellent all-round card.

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