Introduction

Colorful GeForce RTX 4080 Ultra White OC is the company’s premium custom-design air-cooled GeForce RTX 4080 “Ada” graphics card, positioned just a notch below the RTX 4090. The new RTX 4080 has many of the same design goals as the RTX 4090, to rip through any AAA games at 4K Ultra HD native resolution, with maxed out settings, including ray tracing. It’s being offered at a more acceptable price of $1,200 (starting NVIDIA MSRP), which should put custom-designs such as the Colorful Ultra White OC at a decent price-premium. This particular card that we’re reviewing today costs $1,250, which is beyond decent for the kind of value-addition on offer.

The GeForce RTX 4080 launching today was originally meant to be the RTX 4080 16 GB, launching alongside a more affordable $900 RTX 4080 12 GB, but NVIDIA pulled the plug on the 12 GB SKU for branding reasons. Hence today’s launch is simply called the RTX 4080. NVIDIA didn’t cut this SKU down from the large 76 billion-transistor AD102 silicon, nor did it base it on the smaller AD104, but developed a new in-between silicon called the AD103, with just the right number of streaming multiprocessors at a much lower transistor-count of 45 billion, helping it lower manufacturing costs. Also helping in this regard, is the narrower 256-bit GDDR6X memory interface to drive the 16 GB memory, which seems like a downgrade to the RTX 3080 with its 320-bit interface, but NVIDIA has tried to make up the shortfall by increasing memory speeds to 22.4 Gbps, and leveraging architectural advancements, such as larger on-die caches.

The RTX 4080 is endowed with 9,728 CUDA cores across 76 streaming multiprocessors; and armed with 304 of the 4th generation Tensor cores to accelerate AI; and 76 of the 3rd generation RT cores; besides 304 TMUs and 112 ROPs—comparable numbers to the RTX 3080 Ti, but generationally more advanced. The GPU has a boost frequency of 2.50 GHz, which Colorful has overclocked to 2.60 GHz, a fantastic uplift for just $50 more.

The Colorful RTX 4080 Ultra White OC gets its name from a striking new board design with matte-white making up the cooler shroud, backplate, and fans, with vibrant holographic color elements along the cooler shroud. This is one of those close-to-baseline cards gamers would want to buy to just install and play, it gives you everything an RTX 4080 should, and some more.