Introduction

The PNY XLR8 GeForce RTX 4080 Verto OC is the company’s premium take on the new “Ada Lovelace” GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card NVIDIA is launching to bolster its high-end lineup for this generation, presenting gamers many of the same things the RTX 4090 is able to do—play next-generation AAA games at 4K Ultra HD with maxed out settings and ray tracing. The new DLSS 3 frame-generation doubles the frame-rates when you need them to be, which gives this generation plenty of future-proofing. This is PNY’s first rodeo with a completely in-house custom-design GeForce RTX graphics card. The company had been sourcing its XLR8 custom-design cards from Palit Microsystems, and its cards ended up looking like rebadged Gainward products (a brand Palit owns).

NVIDIA designed the GeForce RTX 4080 with a high degree of manufacturing cost optimization, as this is where it expects the most competition from AMD. To this end, the RTX 4080 is based on the new AD103 silicon with fewer SM than the large AD102, but significantly more than the smaller AD104 on which the RTX 4080 12 GB was supposed to be based on, which has since been “unlaunched” and will probably be rebranded into a 70-class product.

The RTX 4080 is endowed with 9,728 CUDA cores, 304 Tensor cores, 76 RT cores, and a 256-bit wide GDDR6X memory interface—another cost-optimization. While the memory size has generationally increased to 16 GB (from 10 GB for the RTX 3080), the memory bus is narrower. NVIDIA compensated for this with faster 22.4 Gbps memory (compared to 19 Gbps); and using larger on-die caches that speed up the memory sub-system.

The PNY XLR8 RTX 4080 Verto OC features a premium 3.5-slot cooling solution with a splash of RGB LED lighting elements, sharp cuts and creases, and features relevant to enthusiast-gamers, such as dual-BIOS. It also comes with a slightly overclocked speeds of 2.55 GHz (compared to 2.50 GHz reference). The most interesting aspect of this card has to be its price, which is bang on the NVIDIA baseline MSRP of $1,200 (no premium). So for everyone who wants an RTX 4080 to install and forget about, and doesn’t care about major factory-overclocks that drive up prices up, this is the card to look out for.