Final words and conclusion
Final words
With revision FTW3 Ultra gaming of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti EVGA offers a product that is among the faster premium graphics cards. It comes with a nice enough tweak and otherwise very proper metrics. it has to be said though, the cooler is barely enough for what it needs to be. The acoustics values are on the high side, along with the GPU load temperatures. That means the cooling capacity is maxing out unless you'd apply even more fan RPM. Overall though, it's enough and within acceptable thresholds. In the end, all that engineering did not bring in a lot of additional performance; the card is running with a close to a 410W on the power limiter yet manages to increase overall framerates by roughly three percent. It did tweak well manually, though, but more on that later. I'll keep saying this, but it is a bizarre time to write reviews on graphics cards with the shortages and insane price hikes related to that. Really what the market needs are affordable, high-performing graphics cards that sit well under the 500 USD marker. The 3080 Ti does fall into a very premium niche and likely will be hard to get. The good news is that the new NVIDIA SKUs are mostly hash-rate limited on the AIB side, preventing cryptocurrency miners from dominating sales. The reality, however, is also that NVIDIA can only fabricate only a certain number of GPUs, and they'll still need to make the call on how much allocation ends up at gamers and how much is intended for other markets. We hope NVIDIA will make wise decisions because if the trend continues, the PC gaming market will die off as they need to realize what software houses will invest in PC gaming if that market is on a sharp decline?
Performance
Overall the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is second to that flagship product, blazingly fast on all fronts, and (based on MSRP) is the cheaper card to get. The cards offer roughly 0% to 1% additional performance seen from FE straight out of the box; the card has been tweaked for you already, but extremely mildly. The 12GB GD6X memory is well balanced; we never understood the expensive 24GB on the 3090, to be brutally honest (not that I mind or don't find it awesome). Overall though, this is a small powerhouse. This card can run games at 4K quite easily with raytracing and a DLSS combo; it will serve you well at that resolution. The closest product from the competition would be the Radeon RX 6900 XT. NVIDIA, however, offers faster raytracing performance and offers you the option to put that into 6th gear with DLSS.
Cooling & noise levels
Depending on the airflow level inside your chassis, expect the card to hit 77~78 Degrees C range temperature-wise under hefty load conditions; this value will depend a little on your chassis and airflow. The noise levels hit roughly 42 DBa; while that sounds like a lot, it's more the airflow creating that DBA value; we did not find the card to be particularly noisy or anything; normal would be the wording I like to use here.
Energy
The power draw under intensive gaming for GeForce RTX 3080 Ti remains to be significant. We measured it to be close to the 410~425 Watts for the FTW3. Are we happy with that amount of energy consumption in the year 2021? No, not at all. Will you, as an end consumer, care about it? We dispute that as well. Keep in mind you'll need a power supply with three 8-pin PCIe graphics power headers. We advise a 700~750 Watt model as the rest of the system needs some juice, and you will want some reserve. You can increase the graphics card power consumption by another 12,5% when you open up that power slider. Yes, that's 460~470 Watts of power consumption just for this graphics card when you flick open all registers manually. Heat output and energy consumption are always closely related to each other as (graphics) processors and heat can be perceived as a 1:1 state; 100 Watts in (consumption) often equals 100 Watts of heat as output. This is the basis of TDP. NVIDIA is listing their TGP at 350 Watts, which the GPU and major components use. We measure the graphics card based on TBP, total board power, as you'd easily forget that fans spinning and RGB also draw power. As such, in peak load conditions, we're hovering exactly at that range and wattage state for typical power draw.
Coil whine
Much like the 3080 and 3090, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti does exhibit coil squeal. Is it annoying? It's at a level you can hear it. In a closed chassis, that noise would fade away in the background. However, with an open chassis, you can hear coil whine/squeal. Graphics cards all make this in some form, especially at high framerates; this can be perceived, albeit we heard very little of it on this Palit card.
Pricing
NVIDIA is pricing the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti at USD 1199. The good news is that that is cheaper than the price of the RTX 3090, while in most scenarios, you are at close to that performance. We do expect AIB cards to be more expensive, as that is a trend as of late. We'll have to wait and see how that pans out, though, as everything is dependant on the actual volume availability of these cards. We can say so little about pricing these days. We have seen this card listed at close to 1400 USD though it's out of stick at the moment.
Tweaking
The card tweaked really well for an RTX 3080 Ti. We've been able to push the power limiter by another 12,5%, then added 140 MHz on the GPU clock resulting in observed boost frequencies towards ~2050 MHz (depends and varies per game title/application). The memory was binned as well; never have we breached 2.1 GHz on GDDR6X stable. All that combined brings us yet another 6% performance premium and 9% seen from the reference model, of course at the cost of even more energy consumption but that is significant.
Conclusion
EVGA pushed this card to the maximum of their cooler capacity, at a rated power consumption of 410 Watts they needed to flock open all registers. This card as a result runs okay enough temperatures, the nut is a little noisier. Overall this brings in roughly 3% additional performance in the GPU resolutions and games. So that's 3 FPS on average more when gaming in that 100 FPS range. This really is how relative it all is. The heat signature overall for this card is okay mut close to cooling capacity limits, we notice operating temps upwards of 75 Degrees C (which can be higher or lower depending on the airflow and your chassis of course. The dba levels seem a little high but these are not really an issue as it's more airflow that is soft rather than annoying noise. Sometimes airflow can be registered by the dba meter, while it remains relatively silent. Of course, the looks are debatable as always with any product, granted this is a lot of RGB bling, but once RGB powers on, it doesn't look bad at all, But that's a matter of taste and opinions. In general, I think anyone would agree with me; we all would love to own a 3080 Ti. This is a very well-balanced enthusiast-class graphics card. Basically, it's almost a 3090 with half the memory and a few configuration tweaks. I am totally fine with the 12GB memory btw; the 24 GB on the 3090 is impressive but far-fetched and made the product extra expensive. 12GB is a notably well-balanced value in the year 2021. Performance-wise NVIDIA carved out something beautiful. You will be way up there in the highest performance regions, and even at Ultra HD, you can enable Raytracing with the combination of DLSS where applicable. Competition-wise, overall, AMD will still win in the lower resolutions thanks to their massive L3 buffer. However, in more demanding scenarios, NVIDIA takes the lead in rasterized shading performance when the resolution goes up when it comes to brute force muscle power in more demanding scenarios. NVIDIA also has faster Raytracing performance and, of course, the implementation of DLSS that will support that raytracing even further in performance. For raytracing, it's still hard to find Games with raytraced properly reflections, but that's what you should be after, and the numbers will grow in the future. EVGA has an appealing offer while offering an excellent 3-year warranty as well, but as always everything comes down to price. The best thing you can do is to pre-order directly from EVGA, that way you'll know for sure you won't pay a penny over 1400 USD, but that is still 200 USD over NVIDIA's FE card. The downside, that stock is limited, very limited. As a product this is definitely recommended by Guru3D.com, however, we currently stopped handing out awards for graphics cards due to the inflated price levels.
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