Nvidia RTX 4080 Founders Edition Review

The RTX 4080 Founders Edition ships in an identical box to the RTX 4090. The front of the box opens up to reveal the card itself, sitting in a cardboard surround.

Inside, a smaller box holds all of the included accessories, with a guide-start guide and power supply recommendation, as well as the 3x 8-pin to 12VHPWR adapter.

If you hadn't already guessed, the overall design of the RTX 4080 Founders Edition is exactly the same as the 4090 FE – Nvidia confirmed to us that they are using the same cooler on both SKUs.

That means we find two 120mm fans, one on the underside which pushes air through the card, and another on the top which pulls out into the chassis. Nvidia also claims switching to fluid dynamic bearings improves acoustics, while the fans are now ‘counter-rotating'. In practice, this means the fan on the underside of the card spins anti-clockwise, while the fan on the top spins clockwise.

One key point to make about the decision to re-use the same cooler as the 4090, is the fact that the RTX 4080 is very large considering it's 320W TGP. It measures 304 x 147 x 61mm, so not only is it significantly taller than the PCIe bracket, but it is also a full three slots thick.

You can see here exactly how much bigger this card is than the RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition, which is actually a 350W card. I can understand that it makes financial sense to use a single cooler across multiple SKUs, as there's no extra cost to design and manufacturer a second heatsink, but considering the power requirements for the 4080, the card does feel unnecessarily large.

The side of the card is fairly plain, with the grey metal frame on show, along with some large aluminium heatsink fins. The GeForce RTX branding is also present here in its new font, and this is illuminated by white LEDs once powered on.

The backplate retains the same x-shaped design as the 30-series, with the RTX 4080 branding visible on the left-hand side. A 120mm fan takes up almost the entirety of the right-hand side.

There's been a lot of controversy around the 12VHPWR connector, but Nvidia has stuck with it for the RTX 4080. The company recently told us it is ‘still investigating' reports of melted connectors but has nothing to share yet. We did not use the included power adapter for our testing today.

Lastly, display outputs consist of 3x DisplayPort 1.4 and 1x HDMI 2.1. I do think it is disappointing that there's no DisplayPort 2.0/2.1 support here, unlike RDNA 3, but HDMI 2.1 still offers plenty of future compatibility with high-bandwidth displays.

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