Today we’ll be taking a look at a group of GeForce RTX 4080 graphics cards and this article will focus on the AORUS RTX 4080 Master. The Aorus brand is an example of a company that knows how to really use their existing branding and the new AORUS Master line of GPUs directly mirrors their motherboard counterparts. As such, this isn’t even AORUS’ top-end card but by itself, the AORUS RTX 4080 MASTER has an unmistakable presece thanks to its enormous size.
Based on NVIDIA’s Ada Lovelace architecture and built on TSMC’s 4N node, the AD103 silicon of the RTX 4080 features 9728 CUDA cores and features 304 4th-gen Tensor (neural) cores and 76 3rd-gen RT cores. NVIDIA sets a 2505Mhz boot clock for the RTX 4080 with an 11200Mhz memory clock on the 22.4Gbps 16GB GDDR6X video memory. The RTX 4080 sees a large difference in overall specs against the RTX 4090’s large 16384 CUDA core but keeps video memory fairly close with 16GB but is wired on a narrower 256-bit bus. NVIDIA announces that the RTX 4080 will start at $1199 and will go on sale starting today.
AORUS is feeling very generous with their cooler for the RTX 4080 Master. At 2.48kg, it is easily the heaviest card we’ve tested for our RTX 4080 launch wave and its gigantic footprint even edges out the enormous ROG STRIX RTX 4080. While the ROG card has a bit of an oversize due to the shroud, the AORUS card is heatsink. Its finstack is visible end-to-end and kisses the outside boundaries of the card’s footprint.
Fin spacing for the AORUS RTX 4080 Master is also similar to the ROG which leads us to believe AORUS just designed the largest possible heatsink that PCIe slots are rated for.
There’s a tiny LCD on the for edge of the AORUS RTX 4080 Master and as much as I like the Aorus mascot, there is no place in high-end hardware with names like Master or Xtreme or in MSI’s case, Godlike and then they slap on their chibi mascots on expensive LCD screens, dancing around like they just got paid.
The NVIDIA RTX 4080 users the newer 12+4 pin 12VPHWR connector and includes adapter plug to use your standard 8-pin PCIe power connectors to the new plug. But while the card uses what’s referred to by some as a PCIe Gen5 power connector, the PCIe standard used by the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 is still PCIe Gen4.
The card will support HDMI and DisplayPort output. Partner cards can have liberties of configuring their own output options. The AORUS RTX 4080 Master features 3x DisplayPort and 1x HDMI.
