Introduction

Gainward GeForce RTX 4080 Phoenix GS is the company’s affordable custom-design graphics card based on the enthusiast segment “Ada” GPU by NVIDIA. Its name is a callback to the “Golden Sample” (GS) days of Gainward GeForce products from some 20 years ago, and stands for “overclocked” today. Gainward’s RTX 4080 lineup includes two distinct product lines, Phantom and Phoenix, with the latter being the flashy, flamboyant product that’s loaded with neatly-done RGB LED lighting. We’ve reviewed the Phantom last year as part of our RTX 4080 launch-day coverage, today we’re bringing you the review of the Gainward RTX 4080 Phoenix GS.

The GeForce RTX 4080 is NVIDIA’s second fastest graphics card from this generation, and is designed for pretty-much the same class of gamer that goes for the RTX 4090 flagship–to play maxed out at 4K Ultra HD resolution, but at a price that’s almost 25% lower, for a $1,200 baseline. You can also max out settings such as real-time ray tracing, and use features such as DLSS 3 frame generation to play at even higher resolutions, such as 5K.

GeForce RTX 4080 is a successor to the RTX 3080 “Ampere,” and rocks 16 GB of GDDR6X memory, albeit across a generationally-narrower 256-bit wide memory bus. The new GeForce “Ada” graphics architecture improves the memory sub-system at an architecture level, with significantly larger on-die caches, so the GPU can make do with narrower memory interfaces. The RTX 4080 nearly maxes out the 5 nm AD103 silicon it’s based on, with 9.728 CUDA cores, 304 Tensor cores, 76 RT cores, 304 TMUs, and 112 ROPs. It enables 76 out of 80 SM present on the AD103. The 16 GB of GDDR6X memory ticks at 22.4 Gbps, at which it yields 717 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

The Gainward RTX 4080 Phoenix GS in today’s review is a factory-overclocked, flashy custom-design graphics card by the company. Despite its RGB bits, the designers tried to keep its cooler shroud surface are to a minimum, exposing more of the meaty aluminium fin-stack heatsink underneath in this big cooler, for better ventilation. The Phoenix GS comes with factory-overclocked speeds of 2610 MHz boost, compared to 2505 MHz reference. With NVIDIA standardizing ATX 12VHPWR with the RTX 40-series, this card features a 16-pin connector that’s rated for 600 W power input capability in theory, bundled with an NVIDIA designed adapter that converts three 8-pin connectors to a 16-pin. Gainward is pricing the GeForce RTX 4080 Phoenix GS at 1350 EUR, which converts to USD 1200, so matching NVIDIA reference MSRP.