NVIDIA announced their RTX 40 series on Sept. 20th and announced 3 SKUs. The GeForce RTX 4090 launched last October 12th and with the RTX 4080 12GB now scrubbed from NVIDIA’s pipe, we now solely focus on the only RTX 4080 model we have right now.
Today we’ll be taking a look at a group of GeForce RTX 4080 graphics cards and this article will focus on NVIDIA’s ownbrand model: the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition. Featuring a large, tripl-slot cooler which is an evolution of the RTX 30’s flow-through cooler but implements a large metal area to dissipate the enthusiast and extreme-class Founder Edition cards of the RTX 40 series.
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.
The NVIDIA RTX 4080 Founders Edition is custom-board design but follows NVIDIA’s set reference spec sheet. The card has a larger flow-through cooler which increases the materil density as well as the fans used on the cooler which should raise the cooling capacity. This in turn has also increased the weight of the cooler which sees it tip the scale at 2.134kg.
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 NVIDIA RTX 4080 Founders Edition features 3x DisplayPort and 1x HDMI.