Colorful GeForce RTX 3080 iGAME VULCAN review - Introduction

Colorful GeForce RTX 3080 iGAME VULCAN OC

In this review, we benchmark the GeForce RTX 3080 iGAME VULCAN OC from Colorful. perhaps this is the most beautiful 3080 out there (you'll get it once you see it). This is a very nice customized and faster-clocked product. All with reasonable acoustics, good temperatures and a bucketload of added features.

It was 2017 when Ampere as a GPU architecture surfaced onto the web, and up-to earlier this year, NVIDIA has not listed this name in any of its roadmaps on the consumer side. It was with military-level secrecy that the Ampere consumer part was developed. Ampere, of course, is the base unit of electric current in the international system of units. But the GPU is named after André-Marie Ampère, a French mathematician and physicist, considered the father of electrodynamics. NVIDIA has a track record of naming their GPU architectures after mathematicians and physicist or closely related fields, to name a few; Pascal, Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell and more recently Turing. While it was no secret that the new GPUs would be based on Ampere, we've seen much discussion about fabrication nodes, architecture, and specifications. Still, everybody seems to have forgotten that Ampere already launched earlier this year for the HPC market. The very first product based on Ampere was the NVIDIA Tesla A100, outfitted with a GA100 Ampere GPU based on 7nm fabricated at TSMC; that product holds 54 billion transistors and has 6912 shader cores.  September 1st of the year 2020 NVIDIA announced three Ampere graphics cards in its initial launch wave. A week before announcements, specifications of the GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 took a twist; the shader core count doubled up from what everybody expected.  The GPUs are fabricated on an 8nm node derived from Samsung. This process is a further development of Samsung's 10nm process, no EUV is applied in production just yet. The first wave of announcements would see the GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 being released first, and as a bit of a surprise, the GeForce RTX 3070 would be arriving in roughly the same timeframe as well. The initial Ampere for consumers launch entails the GeForce RTX 3070 8GB GDDR6, RTX 3080 10GB GDDR6X, and a 24GB GDDR6X based flagship, the GeForce RTX 3090. The lineup brings Gen2 ray-tracing cores and the 3rd iteration tensor cores. These cards all will be PCIe 4.0 interface compatible and offer HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4a. 

iGAME VULCAN OC

The GeForce RTX 3080 iGAME VULCAN OC from Colorful is powered by an NVIDIA GA102 GPU armed with 8704 Shader cores, paired with 10GB of all new GDDR6X graphics memory. If you clock the performance button on the IO panel of the card, out of the box the graphics card boost clock for this product is 1800 MHz (1710 MHz = reference), and it's memory clocked at reference 19 Gbps (19 Gbps reference). Colorful applies a three fan cooler for the VULCAN. Right, a must-see video first, please have a look at what is making this GeForce RTX 3080 iGAME VULCAN OC so special.

 Mandatory, watch it, please.

The basis of this RTX 3080 is already pretty spectacular, however, what gives it that x-factor is an incredibly nice and good looking LCD screen. The iGame GeForce RTX 30 Series Vulcan model inherits the visible multi-function LCD display. The new model LCD3.0 display comes with a 480 mm x 120 mm screen size, one of the largest displays embedded on a graphics card in the market.  The LCD itself is nothing news, but Colorful has stepped up its game by making it a tad bigger. As mentioned, it can be flipped 90 degrees so you can still show that style even when you’re swinging your graphics card. You can put JPG images, GIF, hardware monitoring info, and a lot more useful and fancy imagery right there. You can even change the logo to something more personal. Not only does it look good, but it's also well implemented as you can tilt it in an angle of your preference. Very nice, and very unique as opposed to what other AIBs are doing.