Introduction

We have with us the Zotac GeForce RTX 3080 AMP Holo, the company’s top custom-design RTX 3080 offering available in the North American market. The AMP Holo is positioned a notch above the RTX 3080 Trinity, which we had a chance to review last year. For the most part, the card retains the design of the Trinity’s IceStorm 2.0 cooling solution, but with lavish use of ARGB LED illumination. The lighting is tastefully executed through a large diffuser along the top edge, and across the metal back-plate. The card also features a higher factory overclock than the RTX 3080 Trinity OC.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 “Ampere” is NVIDIA’s current-generation flagship gaming product. Despite the existence of the faster RTX 3090, NVIDIA continues to refer to the RTX 3080 as its flagship because it fulfills everything an enthusiast-gamer would want—maxed out gaming at 4K UHD with RTX raytracing enabled. The GeForce “Ampere” graphics architecture introduces the second generation of NVIDIA’s path-breaking RTX technology, which combines conventional raster 3D graphics with certain real-time raytraced elements to significantly improve realism, such as lighting, reflections, shadows, and global illumination. With 2nd Gen RTX, NVIDIA is also introducing raytraced motion blur, an extremely difficult effect to pull off in real-time, which required the company to innovate a whole new component into its 2nd Gen RT core.

The GeForce Ampere architecture combines new-generation Ampere CUDA cores that can perform concurrent INT32+FP32 math operations, 2nd Gen RT cores that double ray intersection performance over the previous generation and introduce new temporal components, and 3rd Gen Tensor cores, which leverage the sparsity phenomenon in AI DNN to accelerate building and training of neural nets by an order of magnitude. NVIDIA leverages AI for de-noising and its DLSS performance enhancement.

Based on the 8 nm “GA102” silicon, the GeForce RTX 3080 more than doubles the number of unified shaders over the previous generation RTX 2080. It packs 8,704 CUDA cores, 68 RT cores, and 272 Tensor cores. The memory amount has been increased by 25%, to 10 GB, as has the memory bus width, to 320-bit. NVIDIA and Micron Technology have innovated a whole new memory standard for the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, which they call GDDR6X. This memory operates at a blistering data rate of 19 Gbps and helps NVIDIA hit memory bandwidth levels of 760 GB/s.

As we mentioned earlier, the Zotac GeForce RTX 3080 AMP Holo features the company’s highest factory overclock available in the North American market, with the GPU Boost frequency set at 1770 MHz instead of the 1710 MHz reference. It features the company’s IceStorm 2.0 cooling solution that has two large aluminium fin stacks to which heat drawn from the base is conveyed by five heat pipes. A trio of fans ventilate the cooler. The Spectra 3.0 ARGB lighting package could be the brightest spot in your gaming PC build.