Final words and conclusion
Final words
Here we have a premium board that is 200 USD more expensive than the founder edition, it's a notch louder than the reference product, and runs roughly 1 to 2% slower than that reference product. FLIR imaging slows heat bleed just below the power connectors as well. the ZOTAC AMP HOLO GeForce RTX 3080 Ti might have nice looks, but certainly is not a product that is aiming itself in the 6th gear of performance. It offers close or below reference level performance. That overall reference level performance for an RX 3080 Ti is nice of course. The card is running with a close to 350W power limiter. 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.
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 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 70 to 75 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.
Energy
The power draw under intensive gaming for GeForce RTX 3080 Ti remains to be significant. We measured it to be close to the 340~350 Watts for the card. The card could have been able to perform better at defaults; however, ZOTAC restricted the Boost frequency towards 1710 MHz (BIOS default) and limited power distribution to that or even under the reference 350W limiter. Ergo, it's hitting exactly that limiter. 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. We advise a 700~750 Watt model PSU 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 ~35 Watts when you open up that power slider (110%). Yes, that's ~375 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 2000 EUR though, which is a price I could never ever even remotely closely recommend you for a product like this.
Tweaking
The card actually tweaked really well for an RTX 3080 Ti. We've been able to push the power limiter by another 8%, then added 100 MHz on the GPU clock resulting in observed boost frequencies towards 2000~2050 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 a 4 maybe 5 % performance premium, of course at the cost of even more energy consumption.
Conclusion
Hmm, yeah so the 1199 USD Founder edition is the faster-performing buy and a more silent buy as well. If you could even find this product at 1400 USD the only reason for you to purchase it would be the looks? As for the rest it's all below reference levels. While ZOTAC gives you the impression of an overclock at 1710 MHz, the reality is that the card throttles down due to a more restricted power limiter. The heat signature for this card is fine, we notice GPU operating temps of 71 Degrees C (which can be a little higher or lower depending on the airflow and your chassis of course. However, at the backside, we do see severe heat bleed right below the power connectors, hitting 80+ Degrees C. 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. For anywhere from 1400 to 2000 USD, the AMP HOLO is average at best, satisfactory for its looks but a product that is performing at or slightly below reference level at defaults. And that's the best I can make of this.
Sign up to receive a notification when we publish a new article.
Or go back to Guru3D's front page.
- Hilbert, LOAD"*",8,1.
