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Closer look
The card looks exactly as the Gigabyte RTX 3080 Eagle OC as it uses the same cooler and shroud. In fact, I had to double-check a few times that I was taking a photo of the correct card. The only way to know is that the RTX 3090 has a NVLINK-connector and a small sticker on the back saying RTX 3090.
One of the fans spins in the opposite direction which helps create mor turbulence which in turns increases the heat dissipation.
Here you can see an example of the fins and the copper heatsink that helps cool the GPU.
The card comes with 3 HDMI 2.1-connectors and 2 DP 1.4-connectors. Nvidia just missed DP 2.0 that is expected to come out end of the year and has also removed the USB-C-connector that you could find on the RTX 20-series of cards. This was mainly for VR-headsets but it turns out it either wasn’t needed or wasn’t used so much.
The DisplayPort 1.4a outputs support Display Stream Compression (DSC) 1.2a, which lets you connect 4K displays at 120 Hz and 8K displays at 60 Hz. The card can drive two 8K displays at 60 Hz with just one cable per display.
HDMI 2.1 increases bandwidth to 48 Gbps to support higher resolutions, like 4K144 and 8K30, with a single cable. With DSC, this goes up to 4K240 and 8K120.
Gigabyte has decided to only include 2 8-pin power connectors. Togetherwith the PCI-E-slot this means you get around 375W of power. Since the card at default needs 350 W there is limited room for increasing the power target and drawing more juice when overclocking.
Issue with power connectors?
There seem to be some issues with the power connectors on several of Gigabyte’s 3080 and 3090 cards. This thread on Overclockers.uk details it and the response from Gigabyte. The issue is that it seems that the pins on the power connector can come loose and get pushed in. To fix that you would have to completely dismantle the card and that might not even fix it as they can get pushed in again.
While I had this issue on my Gigabyte RTX 3080 Eagle OC I have not experienced any issues with this card.
To see if your card uses the old connector block, check the serial-number of the card. If it starts with 2038 and below it will have the old stype of connector block while 2039 and above uses the new improved one.
