ASUS RTX 3080 TUF Gaming review: Still worth buying in 2023?

The ASUS RTX 3080 TUF Gaming graphics card has given me 18 months of trouble free 4K gaming, but is it still worth buying in 2023?

2020 was not a good time to build a PC. Most of the drool-worthy components were virtually impossible to buy, including the ASUS RTX 3080, thanks to a combination of the pandemic, supply issues, unprecedented demand, Brexit and Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Thankfully, a crypto winter and improvements to chip supplies have helped bring stock back to more accessible levels. Then in 2022 Nvidia launched the new 40-series graphics cards range atopped by the mighty 4090, further easing 30-series supply restraints.

Below that, we have the 4080 but it is the 4070 Ti that is on a level with the ASUS RTX 3080 – at least, in price but sadly not performance.

The technical specs

To use its full name, the Asus TUF Gaming Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 10GB was supposed to cost £600 when it launched in September 2020. In 2023, it can be yours for under £800, depending on your location.

For that you get Nvidia’s older Ampere architectue, 8,704 CUDA cores (the 2080 Ti had 4,352), 10GB of GDDR6X RAM, 320-bit memory interface width, 760.3GB/S memory bandwidth, 1,440MHz base clock speed and a boost clock speed of 1,815MHz in gaming mode.

Power, meanwhile, is rated at 350W and the maximum resolution is 7,680×4,320 pixels (8K). All impressive figures. ASUS recommends at least an 850w power supply unit (PSU).

Meanwhile, the RTX 4070 Ti offers 7,680 CUDA cores, 12GB of GDDR6X RAM, 192-bit memory interface and 504.2GB/S memory bandwidth.

That sounds weaker. However, the 4070 Ti benefits from a smaller 4nm TSMC chip (not the RTX 3080’s Samsung 8nm), 2,310MHz base clock speed and 2,610MHz boost clock speed while using 285W – a substantial 65W less.

That means the 4070 Ti wins on TFLOPS and, being newer, you also get access to third-generation DLSS and ray-tracing technologies. All of this helps result in higher frame-rates, even at 4K resolution gaming.

As for connectivity, the RTX 3080 has two native HDMI 2.1 ports, three native DisplayPort 1.4a ports and HDCP support.

My old GTX 1080 Ti and Arctic Accelero Xtreme IV cooler

Installation was easy. I took out the still decent 1080Ti and the mammouth Arctic Accelero Xtreme IV third-party cooler, slotted the Asus Nvidia 3080 up top because it would actually fit there, moved my AverMedia Live Gamer 4K capture card down to the bottom and that was that.

Being a thirsty card, though nothing close to the 4090, the Asus RTX 3080 TUF Gaming require two eight-pin power connectors. With the painless GeForce Experience software already installed, I just had to update the driver and then chose ‘optimise all’ for my games collection.

After that, it was just a case of keeping an eye out for the latest drivers, which are easily installed via the aforementioned software. The express installation option really is a doddle.

How capable is the RTX 3080?

For 1080p and to some extent 1440p, the 3080 is overkill. Unless, of course, you want mad-fast frame rates for mad-fast refresh rate monitors. For me, I wanted 4K at a stable 60 frames per second while recording 4K gameplay for YouTube.

In combination with an AMD Ryzen 5950X CPU, my PC was capable of exactly that in all games, with only a few tweaks to in-game settings. Sadly, at 4K the 3080 is not capable of maxed out settings in the most recent games such as CyberPunk 2077.

Even so, I’ll be honest, SnowRunner has never looked so good. Nor has Forza Horizon 4 and Forza Horizon 5. Compared with my Xbox Series X, which is a powerhouse in its own right, games really do look noticeably prettier. Especially when I review footage side by side at the point of editing video.

Now what I love about the 3080 and a decent processor (the 5950X is overkill unless your workload requires it) is that, together, you are good to do anything. Video editing, live streaming, 3D modelling, photo adjustment – all snappy as you like. As far as a real-world PC experience goes, you really won’t see much of a difference beyond this point except in extreme circumstances or when chasing benchmark scores.

Will the RTX 3080 run Microsoft Flight Simulator maxed out? Don’t be ridiculous, nothing can (it is also CPU intensive). But other PC games? The 3080 does a glorious job – and that’s even without the likes of DLSS and game optimisation by developers.

Honestly, I can remember being amazed by 2D graphics back in the day. Now we have ray-tracing and graphics cards capable of 4K.

To put that into perspective, a GPU is processing 8,294,400 pixels on screen and refreshed many times a second. The paddle in Pong had 28 pixels. You can even utilise multiple screens for sim racing. Never have gamers been more spoiled.

Also, yeah, the Asus RTX 3080 looks right at home in my ageing Anidees AI Crystal case, especially as it has minimal RGB lighting. I like some bling, not too much that you get magpies smacking into your window.

This particular 3080 has a logo that shifts between colours, which can be controlled using Asus and Corsair’s iCue software. It reminds me of the Transformers logo. Generally, the overall card design is nice and discreet and not too much branding.

As for cooling, those three 80mm fans keep temperatures around 26°C and at peak in the 60s to 70s, depending on ambient temperature. Nerd fact: The middle fan now rotates the other direction to the two outside fans in a bid to decrease turbulence and noise.

Other PC-specific publications and YouTube channels have shown the Asus RTX 3080 TUF Gaming was and still is one of the best 3080 cards overall.

Any negatives though? Well, I wish the RGB lighting was a little less faffy to control and the simple fact is that the little slightly more powerful 4070 Ti makes more sense if the price difference is insignificant in your country.

And that is the crux of it, really. The performance of the ASUS RTX 3080 is excellent, even in 2023. It is just that the 4070 Ti makes more sense from a value and future-proofing perspective and for 1,440p 1,080p gaming you can opt for something noticeably cheaper.