The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 review went live yesterday so now its time for NVIDIA’s board partners to show off their custom designs with the formal launch of the RTX 3080 today. You can read our full review of the RTX 3080 Founders Edition here.
For today’s review we have a couple of products for your consideration, vying for that RTX 3080 savings fund you probably kept during this pandemic for this eventuality. Today, NVIDIA’s is formally launching the RTX 3080 together with its partner vendors and as announced earlier, AIC’s will be able to launch both reference and custom PCB designs today. I’d like to stress that the reference PCB is not the one on the Founders Edition, but a more traditional design.
One of our review today will look at just that, the custom-cooled but reference PCB design version of the RTX 3080 with the ZOTAC RTX 3080 Trinity.
About the ZOTAC RTX 3080 Trinity
The ZOTAC RTX 3080 Trinity is one of the launch model from ZOTAC’s RTX 3080 lined-up which were announced earlier this month. The Trinity is available in a stock SKU and an OC SKU, we’re looking at the stock SKU in this review. This model will be directly 1:1 to NVIDIA’s reference design but since there isn’t a card in NVIDIA’s portfolio representative of their reference cooling, it’s pretty much free for all for all their partners but as we’ve seen already, the NVIDIA RTX 3080 with a relatively beefy cooler.
As a stock model, this card features a the same 1710Mhz base clock as well as memory configurations. The main highlight here how ZOTAC has designed this card’s cooling to tame temperatures and allow it to keep up with the expectations from the custom designed Founders Edition’s flow-thru cooler.
One of the key highlights as well is the lack of the microFit 12-pin connector on this card. That will be the case with most partner designs but they do have the freedom to use the 12-pin connector if they want but with 99.99% of users having only stock 8-pin connectors, all partners will be sticking with traditional two 8-pin on launch models.
The Trinity cooler heavily follows the original ZOTAC stock cooler from the RTX 20 series but the new Trinity cooler features a denser fin stack arranged in a more ornate arrangement. The PCB itself is still reinforced and a backplate rounds out the card design with a nice ZOTAC Gaming logo on the back decked with RGB. Speaking of RGB, the ZOTAC Gaming logo on the side is illuminated as well and has support for ZOTAC’s Spectra lighting. The card is approximately 2.5x slot thick.
| RTX 2080 Ti FE | RTX 3080 FE | ZOTAC RTX 3080 Trinity | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Architecture | Turing | Ampere | Ampere | |
| CUDA Cores | 4352 | 8704 | 8704 | |
| Boost frequency | 1635Mhz | 1710 MHz | 1710 MHz | |
| Memory | 11GB GDDR6 | 10GB GDDR6X | 10GB GDDR6X | |
| Memory frequency | 14 Gbps | 19 Gbps | 19 Gbps | |
| Memory bus | 352-bit | 320-bit | 320-bit |
