Gigabyte RTX 3080 Eagle OC

Temperatures

It should not come as a big surprise that the Gigabyte RTX 3080 Eagle OC needs to cool of a lot of heat. That is why it has 3 fans spinning. It also needs good case cooling, something I quickly learned when putting the card on my Lian Li O11 Dynamic case.

I must admit I’ve been quite lazy checking how warm the GPU’s get in my case as I do not play much with it at the moment. At first I only used a Fractal Design Celsius+ S36 360mm AIO-cooler in the case. I never reallt thought that my case would have issues with a fast GPU but afterwards I realize that running the Asus RTX2080 30 minutes with the 3DMark stresstest gave me a GPU-temp of 86C. Whoa – hot.

So how did the Gigabyte RTX 3080 Eagle OC fare?

I quickly realized that this card also got very hot. And it wasn’t just the GPU that got hot. My whole system warmed up a lot so that both the glass door and the top of the case were very hot. It turns out a lot of heat was dumped into the case. Luckily the 360 mm AIO seemed to handled that well for the CPU.

To improve the air flow in the case I added three new fans: 2x 140 W Be Quiet Silent Wings 3(top) and 1x 120mm Be Quiet Silent Wings 3 High Speed (bottom). 

Even though I added 3 more fans to the system the temperatures and the noise level went down a lot. This is of course good as it allows the GPU to boost more. Without any overclocking I saw the boost frequency hit 1860MHz  or more when  cooled properly compared to around 1780 – 1800 MHz when not cooled properly.

Power

The RTX3080 is a power hungry GPU and this is obvious when comparing it to the RTX 2080.

I would recommend at least a good quality 750 W PSU with the card.