Overall and Final Verdict

Seeing pictures of the ROG Strix RTX 4080 SUPER just doesn’t do Asus’s new card justice in many different ways. For starters, this card is huge. The Nvidia Founders Edition design for the 4080 SUPER which is the same cooler size used on the 4090 and the 3090 before it is a big card but the ROG Strix RTX 4080 SUPER makes that card look small. There has been a gradual creep up in card size and with this being the flagship card, it shows it the most. Beyond that though the pictures don’t give you any idea of the build quality of the ROG Strix RTX 4080 SUPER as well. The textured black fan shroud looks great with its use of the reflective Strix logo and the blue and red additions, but in a photo, you might think it is your standard black plastic fan shroud. The entire shroud and backplate are diecast. Asus also has an exoskeleton under the shroud that is also diecast as well for additional strength. That strength is important given the card's weight and what can happen over time with sagging and PCBs bending. Asus also goes above that with a thick PCB and gluing the GPU in addition to soldering. The design also adds in small details like the fan headers at the end of the card, these make it plug-and-play to have a few case fans that speed up depending on your GPU temperatures rather than your CPU like your motherboard connections will do without changing the settings.

With the large cooler design, the ROG Strix RTX 4080 SUPER did of course perform really well in our cooling performance benchmarks. It ran cooler than the Founders Edition card in all of our tests, especially when we dive into the GPU hotspot and memory temperatures where it stands out. Its noise performance was even better when under load, the only time it was noisier was when you have the three huge fans cranked up to 100% fan speed which it was never close to needing. It was also surprisingly power efficient, with its peak power draw and power draw in our 3Dmark Time Spy Extreme test being significantly lower than the 4080 SUPER Founders Edition putting the ROG Strix RTX 4080 SUPER at the top of our chart in power efficiency with it being better than the 4090 in that test. The only downside in my testing was that with that power efficiency, the ROG Strix RTX 4080 SUPER didn’t really set itself apart from the Founders Edition in a lot of our performance testing. At stock settings, you do get a few FPS more in games, but it seems that Asus has left a lot of the potential performance on the table for you to get with overclocking. The cooler is capable of handling anything you throw at it, we know that. Thankfully getting more out of the card can be as simple as one adjustment in Asus’s GPU Tweak III software. Here are the numbers comparing the Strix RTX 4080 SUPER to the Founders Edition when you run stock and max power targets. The big thing here is that the Strix has a higher limit on its power target, so where the Founders Edition can run at up to 110% the Strix can go up to 131%. This is a huge performance jump between the two with the Founders Editon reaching 14466 and the Strix at almost 1000 higher on its score of 15426.

Like with the Founders Edition review, the Strix RTX 4080 SUPER does extremely well at 4k, handling anything I threw at it in our testing. It also stands out ahead of the competition from AMD when it comes to ray tracing performance and DLSS 3 is still the way to go as well. I said it in my original review but the RTX 4080 SUPER is the GPU that the original RTX 4080 should have been both in performance and pricing and that stands here as well. The Strix RTX 4080 SUPER has an MSRP of $1249.99 (assuming you can find one at that price), the original Strix RTX 4080 when it launched was $1550 so Nvidia’s price drop has helped bring this card down some as well. But you are still paying a big margin over the base RTX 4080 SUPER MSRP. Is it worth that premium? That is really going to depend on what you are looking for in your card. A lot of people will say you are paying an ROG tax but the reality is that you are paying for the high-end diecast shroud, backplate, and exoskeleton, top of the line components, and a huge air cooler. If you want the best possible performance but aren’t looking to throw down for an RTX 4090 then this is the way to go. Unlike with some of the other GPUs though, the price gap between the RTX 4080 SUPER and the RTX 4090 is the one area where these higher-end cards can still be a good option. But if you would be happy with the base RTX 4080 SUPER performance then there are going to be cheaper options including other options from Asus. That is why Asus and their competitors have a range of cards.

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Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.