Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Gaming OC Review

The RTX 4080 SUPER is officially the second-best 40-Series card you can pick up from NVIDIA without looking at the ridiculously powerful RTX 4090. For many, the RTX 4080 SUPER means a 4K-capable card with the ability to max out game settings and even leave DLSS off while maintaining a decent frame rate. Sure, DLSS means you can push these frames higher but the 4080 SUPER is pretty capable of playing any modern game at 4K 60FPS without the help of AI upscaling and frame generation.

Watch this review down below:

The RTX 4080 SUPER marks the “more affordable” best-of-the-best card. When I say “best-of-the-best” this card is still hella expensive but its thousand-dollar price tag might be more accessible to more gamers out there. It is also launching at a cheaper price tag compared to the standard RTX 4080 which is great news too.

This premium-tier GPU does pack the specs to back up its asking price though. It includes 10,240 CUDA Cores, 320 Fourth-Generation Tensor Cores and 80 Third-Generation Ada RT Cores. It includes 16GB of GDDRX RAM running at 23Gbps and It includes 64MB of L2 cache.

This is compared to the high-end, almost superweapon-like RTX 4090 which includes 16,384 CUDA cores, 512 Tensor Cores and 128 RT Cores. It also has 24GB of RAM.

NVIDIA has managed to add performance to the RTX 4080 SUPER while still keeping the same 320W TGP in check so there’s definitely been some advancements in power saving going on here. It kind of makes me excited to see what the company has in store for the 5000-Series Blackwell range later this year.

Before we get into the performance of this review, let’s go over the card I am covering. As usual, the awesome people at Gigabyte sent over the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Gaming OC for me to test out. Like other OC cards, this unit comes slightly overcooked out of the box at 2595MHz compared to the 2550MHz in the reference card.

Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Gaming OC is a chunky GPU. In comparison to my current RTX 4070 Ti, it is not only wider but also thicker. So you’re getting more size and girth here which will make most users with large PC cases happy. The card comes in at 342mm by 150mm and is 75mm thick.

I immediately noticed the thicker design and the slight changes to the power port section. The port where the 16-pin connector goes is indented inwards on the card slightly. There are also heatsinks all over this GPU. While there are a few slight changes in the design here and there, the card’s tech still remains pretty much the same.

The Windforce cooling system includes three 110mm blade fans with alternate spinning for enhanced cooling. I have always been a fan of Gigabyte’s Windforce cooling and it has never let me down in the past.

The Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Gaming OC also comes with the usual RGB Fusion that lets me tweak the fan lights and the Gigabyte logo. It also syncs up with the rest of my system, which is all Gigabyte now, by the way.

The card’s design is familiar but I do enjoy it. It isn’t full of RGB and the steel plating looks clean in my case. When it comes to the ports, the card includes 3 DisplayPort 1.4a ports and 1 HDMI 2.1 port. It does use the 16-pin connector which is included in the box.

Given the size of this card, it does require a motherboard anti-sag mount which is included in the box. It fits perfectly onto my current RTX 4070 Ti mount but if you need to install it yourself, you’ll need to remove a motherboard screw, replace it with the included mount screw and install this metal bracket. The second bracket then attaches to the GPU itself and gets screwed onto the motherboard. This will help prevent the card from sagging when installed.

I do double up the support with a GPU arm. That’s because my current setup is using the Chimney layout so the connectors on the GPU aren’t supported by the back of the case. As a result, I need an additional support structure to keep the card secure.

RTX 4080 SUPER Benchmarks

Going into this review, I wanted to push the whole 4K agenda on this card. NVIDIA markets the RTX 4080 SUPER as the “4K Monster” so all these tests are across 4K games. I also added some new games into the mix including Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Dying Light 2.

My test system includes:

• Cooler Master Cosmos C700M Case
• Gigabyte Aorus X670E Master Motherboard
• Gigabyte RTX 4080 SUPER Gaming OC
• 32GB (2 x 16GB) Kingston FURY Beast DDR5 Memory 4800MT/s
• AMD Ryzen 9 PRO 7945
• Gigabyte Aorus Waterforce X II 360
• Gigabyte UD1000GM PG5 PCIE 5.0 PSU

You can see from the benchmarks that this Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Gaming OC doesn’t have a problem running 4K games at least 60FPS. Sure, there are some games which are slightly more demanding. Maxing out Alan Wake 2 and turning off DLSS, for example, didn’t bode well for the card. We also see the framerate struggle a bit when DLSS is disabled on Dying Light 2 and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Thankfully, a few tweaks here and there in the settings and these performance hiccups were ironed out.

When measuring the metrics, the GPU maxed out at 315 watts. The max temperature reached 64C. Although, I had an odd spike of 68C every now and then. The max fan RPM hit 1770. The GPU Max Clock hit 2790MHz with a memory clock of 11501MHz. The temperatures showed that you can definitely overclock this card even more if you want to. But 2790MHz is more than enough out of the box.

Overall, the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Gaming OC is a powerhouse and excelled in everything I threw at it. DLSS is still needed across a few games and even more so when you’re looking at playing games at over 100fps. However, it was nice to use a card where I could worry less about what I had to turn down and more about what I could increase.

The Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Gaming OC is now available starting at R29,999. The asking price is a little high but you’re getting a true 4K monster here. You can find out more about the card on the official Gigabyte website here.