GALAX GeForce RTX 3080 HOF Extreme Edition Graphics Card Review – The Best Looking Ampere By Far!

Keeping their tradition alive of launching a new graphics architecture every two years, this year, NVIDIA introduces its Ampere GPU. The Ampere GPU is built upon the foundation set by Turing. Termed as its biggest generational leap, the NVIDIA Ampere GPUs excel compared to previous generations at everything.

The Ampere lineup offers faster shader performance, faster ray tracing performance, and faster AI performance. Built on a brand new process node and featuring an architecture designed from the ground up, Ampere is a killer product with lots of numbers to talk about.

The fundamental of Ampere was to take everything NVIDIA learned with its Turing architecture and not only refine it but to use its DNA to form a product in a completely new performance category. Tall claims were made by NVIDIA when they introduced its Ampere lineup earlier this month & we will be finding out whether NVIDIA hit all the ticks with its Ampere architecture as this review will be your guiding path to see what makes Ampere and how it performs against its predecessors.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Gaming Graphics Cards - The Biggest GPU Performance Leap in Recent History

Turing wasn't just any graphics core, it was the graphics core that was to become the foundation of future GPUs. The future is realized now with next-generation consoles going deep in talks about ray tracing and AI-assisted super-sampling techniques. NVIDIA had a head start with Turing and its Ampere generation will only do things infinitely times better.

The Ampere GPU does many traditional things that we would expect from a GPU, but at the same time, also breaks the barrier when it comes to untraditional GPU operations. Just to sum up some features:

• New Streaming Multiprocessor (SM)
• New Turing Tensor Cores
• New Real-Time Ray Tracing Acceleration
• New Shading Enhancements
• New Deep Learning Features For Graphics & Inference
• New GDDR6X High-Performance Memory Subsystem
• New 2nd Generation NVLINK Interconnect
• New HDMI 2.1 Display Engine & Next-Gen NVENC/NVDEC

The technologies mentioned above are some of the main building blocks of the Ampere GPU, but there's more within the graphics core itself which we will talk about in detail so let's get started.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Pricing Per Segment

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 series is made up of a diverse portfolio of graphics cards. Currently, you will only be limited to the higher-end configurations starting at $499 US for the GeForce RTX 3070, $699 US for the GeForce RTX 3080, and $1499 US for the GeForce RTX 3090. NVIDIA themselves call the GeForce RTX 3080 the flagship graphics card and not the GeForce RTX 3090.

The RTX 3080 & RTX 3070 are both priced well and in-line with their predecessors but the GeForce RTX 3090 goes all out with a price of $1499 US. NVIDIA calls the GeForce RTX 3090 the "BFGPU" and as per the terminology, it seems like this is a new marketing name for the Titan graphics card. It is likely that we could see a Titan based card under the Quadro branding with faster specs out of the box but the GeForce RTX 3090 is purely a gaming graphics card first with all the horsepower for intense professional and workstation workloads.

With that said, the GeForce RTX 3080 replaces the RTX 2080 SUPER at the same price point and the GeForce RTX 3070 replaces the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER at the same price point. Given this trend, we might see the more mainstream variants cost just as much as their RTX 20 SUPER series cards but with a higher performance out of the box.

NVIDIA GeForce GPU Segment/Tier Prices

Graphics Segment	2014-2016	2016-2017	2017-2018	2018-2019	2019-2020	2020-2021
Titan Tier	Titan X (Maxwell)	Titan X (Pascal)	Titan Xp (Pascal)	Titan V (Volta)	Titan RTX (Turing)	GeForce RTX 3090
Price	$999 US	$1199 US	$1199 US	$2999 US	$2499 US	$1499 US
Ultra Enthusiast Tier	GeForce GTX 980 Ti	GeForce GTX 980 Ti	GeForce GTX 1080 Ti	GeForce RTX 2080 Ti	GeForce RTX 2080 Ti	GeForce RTX 3080 Ti
Price	$649 US	$649 US	$699 US	$999 US	$999 US	$1199 US
Enthusiast Tier	GeForce GTX 980	GeForce GTX 1080	GeForce GTX 1080	GeForce RTX 2080	GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER	GeForce RTX 3080
Price	$549 US	$549 US	$549 US	$699 US	$699 US	$699 US
High-End Tier	GeForce GTX 970	GeForce GTX 1070	GeForce GTX 1070	GeForce RTX 2070	GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER	GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GeForce RTX 3070
Price	$329 US	$379 US	$379 US	$499 US	$499 US	$599 $499
Mainstream Tier	GeForce GTX 960	GeForce GTX 1060	GeForce GTX 1060	GeForce GTX 1060	GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER GeForce RTX 2060 GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER GeForce GTX 1660	GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB
Price	$199 US	$249 US	$249 US	$249 US	$399 US $349 US $279 US $229 US $219 US	$399 US $329 US
Entry Tier	GTX 750 Ti GTX 750	GTX 950	GTX 1050 Ti GTX 1050	GTX 1050 Ti GTX 1050	GTX 1650 SUPER GTX 1650	TBA
Price	$149 US $119 US	$149 US	$139 US $109 US	$139 US $109 US	$159 US $149 US	TBA

In addition to the specs/price update, NVIDIA's RTX technologies are being widely adopted by major game engines and APIs such as Microsoft's DirectX (DXR), Vulkan, Unreal Engine, Unity, and Frostbite. While there were only three RTX titles around the launch of the RTX 20 series cards, NVIDIA now has at least 28 titles that utilize their RTX feature set to offer real-time ray tracing with more coming soon.

In addition to that, with the upcoming consoles confirmed to feature ray tracing, developers can also make use of the RTX technology to fine-tune future games for the GeForce RTX hardware. Currently, NVIDIA has 13 game engines that are leveraging their RTX technologies for use in their upcoming and existing games while both Vulkan and DirectX 12 Ultimate APIs are part of the RTX ecosystem on the PC platform.

So for this review, I will be taking a look at GALAX's flagship GeForce RTX 3080 HOF graphics card which goes for a premium of $2200 US since it is a limited edition product aimed at enthusiasts & modders.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Graphics Card

At the heart of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card lies the GA102 GPU. The GA102 is one of the many Ampere GPUs that we will be getting on the gaming segment. The GA102 GPU is the fastest gaming GPU that NVIDIA has produced. The GPU is based on Samsung's 8nm custom process node designed specifically for NVIDIA and features a total of 28 Billion transistors. It measures at 628mm2 which makes it the 2nd biggest gaming GPU ever produced right below the Turing TU102 GPU.

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The new shader core on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture is 2.7x faster, the new RT cores are 1.7x faster while the new Tensor cores are up to 2.7x faster than the previous generation Turing GPUs. The 2nd Generation RT core delivers dedicated hardware-accelerated ray-tracing performance & features twice the ray/triangles intersection with concurrent RT graphics and compute operations.

For the GeForce RTX 3080, NVIDIA has enabled a total of 68 SM units on its flagship which results in a total of 8704 CUDA cores. In addition to the CUDA cores, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 also comes packed with next-generation RT (Ray-Tracing) cores, Tensor cores, and brand new SM or streaming multi-processor units.

In terms of memory, the GeForce RTX 3080 comes packed with 10 GB of memory and that too the next-generation GDDR6X design. With Micron's latest and greatest graphics memory dies, the RTX 3080 can deliver GDDR6X memory speeds of 19.0 Gbps. That along with a bus interface of 320-bit will deliver a cumulative bandwidth of 760 Gbps.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series 'Ampere' Graphics Card Specifications:

Graphics Card Name	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
GPU Name	Ampere GA106-300	Ampere GA104-200	Ampere GA104-300	Ampere GA102-200	Ampere GA102-300
Process Node	Samsung 8nm	Samsung 8nm	Samsung 8nm	Samsung 8nm	Samsung 8nm
Die Size	TBC	395.2mm2	395.2mm2	628.4mm2	628.4mm2
Transistors	TBC	17.4 Billion	17.4 Billion	28 Billion	28 Billion
CUDA Cores	3584	4864	5888	8704	10496
TMUs / ROPs	112 / 64	152 / 80	184 / 96	272 / 96	328 / 112
Tensor / RT Cores	112 / 28	152 / 38	184 / 46	272 / 68	328 / 82
Base Clock	1320 MHz	1410 MHz	1500 MHz	1440 MHz	1400 MHz
Boost Clock	1780 MHz	1665 MHz	1730 MHz	1710 MHz	1700 MHz
FP32 Compute	13 TFLOPs	16 TFLOPs	20 TFLOPs	30 TFLOPs	36 TFLOPs
RT TFLOPs	25 TFLOPs	32 TFLOPs	40 TFLOPs	58 TFLOPs	69 TFLOPs
Tensor-TOPs	101 TOPs	192 TOPs	163 TOPs	238 TOPs	285 TOPs
Memory Capacity	12 GB GDDR6	8 GB GDDR6	8 GB GDDR6	10 GB GDDR6X	24 GB GDDR6X
Memory Bus	192-bit	256-bit	256-bit	320-bit	384-bit
Memory Speed	16 Gbps	14 Gbps	14 Gbps	19 Gbps	19.5 Gbps
Bandwidth	384 Gbps	448 Gbps	448 Gbps	760 Gbps	936 Gbps
TGP	170W	175W	220W	320W	350W
Price (MSRP / FE)	$329 US	$399 US	$499 US	$699 US	$1499 US
Launch (Availability)	25th February 2021	2nd December 2020	29th October 2020	17th September 2020	24th September 2020

In case you want to read our full NVIDIA Ampere GPU architecture deep dive and GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition review, head over to this link.

The GALAX HOF series is renowned for its insanely beautiful design schemes covered in all-white colors. The white color covers the entire card including the shroud, fans, backplate, and the PCB. It looks like GALAX is going for a sleeker look this time compared to the GeForce RTX 20 HOF series design which celebrated its 10th anniversary of the HOF brand.

From what I can see, the rendered GeForce RTX 30 HOF series graphics card focuses more on the outer design aspects of the card. As for the design, the card seems to feature a dual-slot design & comes with a triple-fan cooling solution. These are new fan blades that have been incorporated by GALAX compared to the standard fan blades on the RTX 20 HOF series graphics cards. The two fans on the sides are wider than the one in the middle. The shroud features a hexagonal structure in the middle and the reason why the middle fan is slightly smaller has to do with the RGB LEDs that are featured around it.

The RGB layout is very interesting and will look even better in the final variant. The sides of the card feature the Hall of Fame and GeForce RTX brandings. This is still an early render so a lot of details are missing such as the PCB, power connectors, backplate design, and the I/O ports. With that said, the GALAX GeForce RTX 30 HOF series graphics cards will feature a white PCB with a stunning and reflective surface backplate.

Display outputs are likely to include the standard 3 DP and 1 HDMI 2.1 ports but we could also see some extra additions such as an OC switch and Dual BIOS switch on the PCB. The PCB itself will be rocking an extremely insane design that will be geared towards LN2 overclockers which have been a tradition for the HOF series cards. GALAX has told us that the card is expected to be announced by end of December or early next year.

In terms of clock speeds, the GALAX GeForce RTX 3080 HOF graphics card features an 1815 MHz boost clock (Gaming & Silent Mode) with a TGP of 400W. The card is powered by a triple 8-pin connector configuration that boots the 24 phases (14+6+4) phase power delivery.

Following are some of the features of the GALAX GeForce RTX 3080 HOF before we go into detail:

GPU Engine Specs:

• CUDA Cores 8704
• Boost Clock (MHz) 1800
• 1-Click OC Clock (MHz) 1815 (by installing Xtreme Tuner Plus Software and using 1-Click OC)

Memory Specs:

• Memory Speed 19 Gbps
• Standard Memory Config 10GB
• Memory Interface Width 320-bit GDDR6X
• Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 760

Feature Support:

• PCI-E 4.0
• Windows 10 64-bit, Linux 64-bit

Fan Feature:

• 1*92mm + 2*102mm
• WINGS With Fan Stop

Display Support:

• DisplayPort 1.4a x 3, HDMI 2.1

Dimensions:

• Dimensions(with Bracket): 352*160*68mm
• Dimensions(without Bracket): 339*144*68mm

GALAX GeForce RTX 3080 HOF Graphics Card Gallery:

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The GALAX GeForce RTX 3080 HOF series graphics card comes inside a large cardboard box. The front of both packages has a large "GeForce RTX" brand logo along with the "HOF" logo on the right side. A silhouette of the card with three fans and its specific codename/memory configuration is listed on the front.

The packaging has put a large emphasis on the RTX side of things as the first feature enlisted by AIBs will be NVIDIA Ampere architecture, Ray Tracing & DLSS support. NVIDIA has bet the future of their gaming GPUs on Ray Tracing support as these are the first cards to offer support for the new feature.

The back of the box is very typical, highlighting the main features and specifications of the cards. Some of the key features that GALAX has listed include overclocking support which is the main aim with its HOF series cards, Aurora RGB, Premium components, Dual BIOS design, HOF White PCB, and HOF AI software suite.

There's also a focus towards GeForce.com on each AIB card through which users can download the latest drivers and GeForce Experience application which are a must for gamers to access all feature sets of the new cards.

The sides of the box once again greet us with the large GeForce RTX branding. There's also the mention of 10 GB GDDR6X ( RTX 3080) memory available on the card. The internal packaging is interesting since not only does it mention the full name of the card but also lists down the specific GPU and memory configuration. The GPU in the case of the RTX 3080 HOF is the GA102-202 which is the newer Ampere SKU with LHR enabled.

Outside of the box, the graphics card and the accessory package are held firmly by foam packaging. The graphics card comes with a few accessories and manuals which might not be of much use for hardcore enthusiasts but can be useful for the mainstream gaming audience. The accessories are a GPU support stand and a pair of gloves that make sure you don't get any smudges or dirt on the pure white shroud or backplate when installing it.

The card is an absolute beauty to look at at first glance as you can see in the pictures we have posted.

GALAX knows their core market for HOF products is enthusiasts so they don't want to bore them with installation guides or manuals. Hence you won't find them in here.

After the package is taken care of, I can finally start talking about the card itself. Once again, you are greeted with a card that looks unlike any other we have seen on the market yet.

GALAX GeForce RTX 3080 HOF is a huge graphics card, one that even eclipses the RTX 3090 FE. It comes in a three-slot design and measures 339x133x68mm. Given the weight of the card, it can be advised to use the included support bracket to make sure the PCB doesn't sag.

You would have to keep in mind the height when going for a dual card solution as your case or motherboard PCIe slot combination may not allow such setup. The cooling shroud extends all the way to the back of the PCB and it requires a casing with good interior space for proper installation.

The back of the card features a solid backplate that looks stunning in an all-white color scheme with polygonal textures. The backplate offers a lot more functionality than just looks which I will get back to in a bit.

GALAX celebrated its 10th Anniversary of the HOF brand with the previous GeForce RTX 20 series cards. This means that this is the 6th generation of the HOF design that we are getting and it all started back with the GeForce 600 series cards. GALAX has maintained its classic white-colored PCB and cooler design and improved upon it over the generations.

The new heatsink looks like a beefed-up version of the one that was featured on the RTX 20 series HOF cards with the main changes being the shroud and heatsink design that features an aggressive shroud design on the front, featuring a full-white color with RGB emitting hexagonal design in the middle fan. The backside also comes with a large RGB accent bar which lights up the HOF Logo.

Coming to the fans, the card actually features two different fan designs with the one in the middle measuring 92mm with 11 blades and two on the sides measuring 120mm with 11 blades too. All fans deploy a double ball bearing design and can last a long time while operating silently. The fans come with white-colored blades too which blends in nicely with the entire theme of the card.

GALAX also features their 0db technology on the HOF heatsink. This feature won’t spin the fans on the card unless they reach a certain threshold.

In the case of the GALAX HOF heatsink, that limit is set to 60C. If the card is operating under 60C, the fans won’t spin which means no extra noise would be generated.

I am back at talking about the full-coverage, full metal-based backplate which the card uses. The whole plate is made of solid metal with angular edges that add to the durability of this card. The white finish with polygonal elements on the backplate gives a unique aesthetic. The graphics card also comes with a compact PCB design which means that the shroud, heatsink, and backplate are all extended beyond the PCB. The third fan blows air through the heatsink and blows it out from the cutouts that are situated at the very end of the backplate.

There are cutouts in screw placements to easily reach the points on the graphics card. We can also see the GALAX HOF logo on the back which looks stunning. GALAX is also using heat pads beneath the backplate which offer more cooling to the electrical circuitry on the PCB. GALAX has also placed voltage measuring points on the back of the PCB.

With the outsides of the card done, I will now start taking a glance at what's beneath the hood of these monster graphics cards. The first thing to catch my eye is the humungous fin stack that's part of the beefy heatsink which the cards utilize.

The large fin stack runs all the way from the front and to the back of the PCB and is so thick that you can barely see-through.

The heatsink has been designed to be denser by incorporating both standard and dense aluminum fins. There's far more surface area for the GPU, VRAM and VRMs to dissipate heat to than the last-gen cards.

Talking about the heatsink, the massive block is comprised of six copper squared-shaped heat pipes with a more concentrated design to transfer heat from the copper base to the heatsink more effectively. The base itself is a solid nickel-plated base plate, transferring heat to the heat pipes in a very effective manner.

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Furthermore, the top layer of the PCB has two aluminum fin stacks running at the sides which offer extra durability and better cooling on the components too.

I/O on the graphics card sticks with the reference scheme which includes three Display Port 1.4a & a single HDMI 2.1 port. You can also note that there's a button on the I/O panel which is part of the Hyper Boost functionality that allows the fan speed to be maximized with a single push of a button.

There's also a dual-BIOS switch on the card which comes pre-configured with Silent (S-Mode) & Gaming (P-Mode) modes. The performance mode not only unlocks higher clocks but also enables a higher power limit. There's also an ARGB Sync header next to the BIOS switch.

GALAX GeForce RTX 3080 HOF Teardown:

GALAX makes use of a 24 phase (14+6+4) PWM design that includes its premium components.

The card also uses the GDDR6 memory from Micron that operates at 19.0 Gbps alongside a 320-bit wide memory interface.

The GALAX HOF series has always been aimed at extreme overclockers. Being so, the card utilizes a triple 8-pin connector configuration as opposed to a single 12-pin EPS configuration that the FE variant features. The card is rated at 400W TGP.

GALAX GeForce RTX 3080 HOF RGB Lighting Gallery:

GALAX lets you customize RGB accents on the fan, side, and back using their Xtreme Tuner App. You can fully customize the RGB lights to your preference using the app from GALAX's web page. Additionally, there's an ARGB header on the back of the card which you can see above.

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We used the following test system for comparison between the different graphics cards. The latest drivers that were available at the time of testing were used from AMD and NVIDIA on an updated version of Windows 10. All games that were tested were patched to the latest version for better performance optimization for NVIDIA and AMD GPUs.

GALAX GeForce RTX 3080 HOF Test Setup:

CPU	Intel Core i7-10700K @ 5.10 GHz Intel Core i9-9900K @ 4.70 GHz
Motherboard	AORUS Z490 Master AORUS Z390 Master
Video Cards	MSI GeForce RTX 3080 TI SUPRIM X MSI GeForce RTX 3090 SUPRIM X MSI GeForce RTX 3080 SUPRIM X MSI Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming X Trio MSI Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming X Trio MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming X MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Lightning Z MSI GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER Gaming X Trio MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Gaming X Trio MSI Radeon RX 5700 XT Gaming X MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Lightning X
Memory	G.SKILL Trident Z RGB Series 32GB (4 X 8GB) CL16 3600 MHz
Storage	Samsung SSD 960 EVO M.2 (512 GB)
Power Supply	ASUS ROG THOR 1200W PSU
OS	Windows 10 64-bit
Drivers	AMD Radeon Adrenalin Edition 21.9.2 NVIDIA GeForce 471.96 WHQL

• All games were tested on 2560×1440 (2K) and 3840×2160 (4K) resolutions.
• Image Quality and graphics configurations have been provided in the screenshots below.
• The “reference” cards are the stock configs while the “overclock” cards are factory overclocked configs provided to us by various AIB partners.

Doom Eternal

DOOM Eternal brings hell to earth with the Vulkan-powered idTech 7.  We test this game using the Ultra Nightmare Preset and follow our in-game benchmarking to stay as consistent as possible.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Developed by Rockstar San Diego, Red Dead Redemption II is one of the most visually stunning open-world games I've played to date that is backed up by a rich story set around the protagonist, Arthur Morgan. The game is based on the RAGE engine which features an insane amount of graphics fidelity but also requires a lot of power to run maxed out. For the purpose of this test, we set the graphics settings to Ultra with AA turned disabled.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood

Wolfenstein is back in The New Colossus and features the most fast-paced, gory, and brutal FPS action ever! The game once again puts us back in the Nazi-controlled world as BJ Blazkowicz. Set during an alternate future where Nazis won the World War, the game shows that it can be fun and can be brutal to the player and to the enemy too. Powering the new title is once again, id Tech 6 which is much acclaimed after the success that DOOM has become. In a way, ID has regained their glorious FPS roots and are slaying with every new title.

Ashes of The Singularity: Escalation

NVIDIA and AMD have been tweaking the performance of their cards for Ashes of the Singularity since the title was released. It was the first to make use of the DirectX 12 API and the first to leverage the new Async compute technology that makes use of the DX12 renderer to improve performance.

Battlefield V

Battlefield V brings back the action of the World War 2 shooter genre. Using the latest Frostbite tech, the game does a good job of looking gorgeous in all ways possible. From the open-world environments to the intense and gun-blazing action, this multiplayer and single-player FPS title is one of the best-looking Battlefields to date.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Humanity is at war with itself and divided into factions. On one end, we have the pure and on the other, we have the augmented. That is the world where Adam Jensen lives in and this is the world of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. The game uses the next-generation Dawn Engine that was made by IO interactive on the foundation of their Glacier 2 engine. The game features the support of DirectX 12 API and is one of the most visually intensive titles that taxes the GPU really hard.

Death Stranding

Sam Porter Bridges has delivered one of PS4's most anticipated games to the PC community and opened a whole new world of possibilities. This was the first game to feature the Decima Engine on PC and unarguably did it the best. Death Stranding may not feature ray tracing effects but it does showcase that DLSS can be used effectively even when RT isn't around. We tested this one just like we did in our launch coverage with DLSS enabled.

Forza Horizon 4

Forza Horizon 4 carries on the open-world racing tradition of the Horizon series.  The latest DX12 powered entry is beautifully crafted and amazingly well executed and is a great showcase of DX12 games.  We use the benchmark run while having all of the settings set to non-dynamic with an uncapped framerate to gather these results.

Hitman 2 (DX12 Highest Settings)

Hitman 2 is the highly acclaimed sequel to 2016 Hitman which was a redesign and reimaging of the game from the ground up. With a focus on stealth gameplay through various missions, the game once again lets you play as Agent 47 who embarks on a mission to hunt down the mysterious Shadow Client. The game runs on IO Interactive's Glacier 2 engine which has been updated to deliver amazing visuals and environments on each level while making use of DirectX 12 API.

Shadow of The Tomb Raider

Sequel to The Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of The Tomb Raider is visually enhanced with an updated Foundation Engine that delivers realistic facial animations and the most gorgeous environments ever seen in a Tomb Raider Game. The game is a technical marvel and really shows the power of its graphics engine in the latest title.

Metro Exodus

Metro Exodus continues the journey of Artyom through the nuclear wasteland of Russia and its surroundings. This time, you are set over the Metro, going through various regions and different environments. The game is one of the premier titles to feature NVIDIA’s RTX technology and does well in showcasing the ray-tracing effects in all corners.

Assassins Creed: Origins

Assassins Creed Origins is built by the same team that made Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag. They are known for reinventing the design and game philosophy of the Assassins Creed saga and their latest title shows that. Based in Egypt, the open-world action RPG shows its graphics strength in all corners. It uses the AnvilNext 2.0 engine which boosts the draw distance range and delivers a very impressive graphics display.

We tested the game at maxed settings with TAA enabled and 16x AF. Do note that the game is one of the most demanding titles out in the market and as such tweaks and performance issues are being patched out.

Borderlands 3

Borderlands 3 has made its way into the test lineup thanks to strong demand by gamers and simply delivering MORE Borderlands. The game was tested with max settings under the DX11 preset since the DX12 preset doesn't deliver any visible improvement in either frame rate or graphics at the moment.

Far Cry 5

Far Cry 5 is a standalone successor to its predecessor and takes place in Hope County, a fictional region of Montana. The main story revolves around doomsday cult the Project at Eden’s Gate and its charismatic leader Joseph Seed. It uses a beefed-up Dunia Engine which itself is a modified version of CryEngine from Crytek.

Final Fantasy XV

Grand Theft Auto V

GTA V is the most optimized gaming title that has been made for the PC. It’s so optimized, it even runs on my crap GT 840M-based laptop with a smooth FPS on a mix of medium/low settings. I mean what???

Aside from being optimized, GTA V is a great game. It was the Game of The Year for 2013. At 1440p Ultra quality, the game gave us smooth frames on all cards tested.

No graphics card review is complete without evaluating its temperatures and thermal load. The GALAX GeForce RTX 3080 HOF graphics card comes with a triple-fan cooler with 0db fan technology, a massive heatsink that is composed of several aluminum fins and heat pipes, and an extended backplate that covers the entire PCB.

Note – We tested load with Kombuster which is known as a ‘power virus’ and can permanently damage the hardware. Use such software at your own risk!

I compiled the power consumption results by testing each card under idle and full stress when the card was running games. Each graphics card manufacturer sets a default TDP for the card which can vary from vendor to vendor depending on the extra clocks or board features they plugin on their custom cards. Default TDP for the RTX 3080 is set at 320W while the GALAX custom model has a TDP 400W.

Also, it's worth noting that the 8nm process from Samsung increases the density by around 2x versus the previous generation. NVIDIA is cramping even larger amounts of transistors and more cores than their previous cards, making it one of the densest chips built to date. It's likely to consume a lot of power and the results are reflective of that.

The GALAX HOF series has always been an iconic brand that has a special place in the hearts of enthusiasts and overclockers. The HOF 'Hall of Fame' series has broken various world records & there's no stopping the latest HOF series. With the GeForce RTX 30 HOF series, GALAX has once again pushed the envelope in terms of performance and PCB design. There's no doubt that all overclockers will have their eyes on the HOF series and in fact, the HOF series already ranks 1st within 3DMark's Hall of Fame.

The GALAX GeForce RTX 3080 HOF that I received for this test is the base HOF model that doesn't feature the LCD panel like the RTX 3080 Ti or RTX 3090 HOF. It comes with a highly-binned GA102 GPU but with LHR enabled so it's only useful for gaming and overclocking purposes (as it should be). The card comes with a nice overclock out of the box but it isn't the highest that we have seen for an RTX 3080. Yet, the additional power limit that's featured on the performance profile which we used as default allows for higher boost clock stability than the other models we had tested. It also pushed the power envelope over 500W at max load which is insane for an RTX 3080 but you're also feeding 24 power phases.

The most impressive aspect is that while the TGPs for the card have seen a hefty increase (80W for the RTX 3080), the cooler does an incredible job by keeping both cards steady and cool under 65C. The RTX 3080 HOF peaked at 64C even under full load using the fully-unlocked performance profile and if you want that extra cooling performance, then turning the fans all the way to 100% will lead to sub-60C temps but in return, you'd have to face the louder fan noise which gets a bit noticeable at that point.

The triple-fan solution comes with 0db fan technology which unless or until you're touching 60C won't spin at all. This allows lower noise levels when you're not doing any graphics-intensive tasks. GALAX went all the way by including a full metal backplate on the card which comes with dual copper heat pipes to effectively transfer heat from the back.

But we have to talk about the one stand-out feature of the card aside from its overclocking-geared design and that's the overall look of this card. ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, and the rest might have their own great-looking gaming cards but GALAX is the king when it comes to creating white-colored coolers and PCBs. The RTX 30 HOF is definitely their best design to date with polygonal textures on the front and back along with subtle RGB accents in the middle fan, the sides, and the back logo. It is a looker and besides overclockers, modders will also be after this beauty.

Now pricing, GALAX is charging a hefty $2200 US for the GeForce RTX 3080 HOF which is purely insane. But we have to keep in mind that the HOF series is already a limited production build & considering the current market situation, the pricing should be a given. Plus, we have seen the HOF series being gobbled up by overclockers and modders so even at $2000 US+ prices, the RTX 3080 HOF is going to sell. And no, we don't recommend getting an RTX 3080 at that price if you're purely buying it for gaming as there are several cheaper variants available. If you really want to buy this beast of a card, then you either have to make sure that you put its overclocking capabilities to good use (which the majority won't anyways consider LN2 isn't a common cooling practice) or make a PC for showcasing this card. The card is simply a trophy piece if you aren't gonna do either of those.

GALAX's GeForce RTX 3080 HOF is an outstanding graphics card and I am glad I got to test out this limited edition product. As a gamer, I wouldn't recommend this card simply because it performs like any RTX 3080 but costs way too much but if you're an overclocker or an enthusiast who loves to go all out with the best looking and best overclocking card, the RTX 3080 HOF from GALAX is an insane product with lots of untapped power who only the experts can tap in to and looks that will make everyone jealous of your PC if you're willing to spend over two grand on this card.

The post GALAX GeForce RTX 3080 HOF Extreme Edition Graphics Card Review – The Best Looking Ampere By Far! by Hassan Mujtaba appeared first on Wccftech.