evga geforce rtx 3080 ti xc3 ultra hybrid gaming

The following recommendations are assuming you can purchase a 3080 at post-tariff MSRP prices.

Having said all of that, I noticed an immediate performance boost due to the improved cooling, reaching almost 80fps on RDR2 and 16k total score on 3DMark with the following stable overclock: 107% / +150mhz / +1000mhz (power/clock/memory). At this point, I wish I had been able to purchased the FTW3, which can draw extra power. Although this is great, I can't help but feel like I've overshot the cooling performance I needed for this card. After a relatively easy install (use YT guides - they're very helpful where the included instructions become unclear, a quick fan upgrade to the radiator, and a BIOS update to the hybrid bios (you must do this to get proper fan controls and RGB), my card now idles at ~20C and barely hits 50C under load. Once I realized that the stock cooler wasn't going to work, instead of RMA'ing / returning I decided to spend an extra ~$110 on a hybrid cooler directly from EVGA. Other reviews I have encountered have had similar sentiments. You may be able to play around with re-applying thermal paste (my stock application had a few places where the paste wasn't completely covering the die, so I presume that I just got an especially bad unit) to get better results here, but the fact remains that the stock cooler just isn't up to the task of cooling this card. For this reason, and given what I paid (over $800), I would not recommend the XC3 Ultra - the stock cooler just isn't good enough. I also tested with side panels off and fan curves maxed out (temps were still bad). I have a Meshify C with good airflow - my old card never went above 60C under load. Unusable really - temps were throttling at the 83C limit with stock power usage and no OC - I had to undervolt my card to 90% power limit just to get temps to sit right below 80C and fans still going at basically max speeds. With the stock cooler, temps and noise were BAD. Older / less intensive games such as AOE2 played great at my monitor's max 144fps. However, as I'll cover in the later sections of the review, I was hitting thermal throttling limits and losing performance with the stock cooler. I was a bit disappointed that I only went from around 50fps -> 60fps in my favorite game, RDR2. Performance: 15-20% improvement from my old card (5700xt). All games are played at Ultra settings on a 144hz UWQHD monitor. My Build: 5600X / 3080 XC3 Ultra Hybrid / 32GB / x570 Tomahawk / NH-D15 / Meshify C. In this post, I'd like to post my impressions of the card, the improvements I've noticed in my favorite titles, and my review of the hybrid kit that I installed.

I was lucky (?) enough to purchase a EVGA 3080 XC3 Ultra Gaming from in mid-January of 2021.

Evga geforce rtx 3080 ti xc3 ultra hybrid gaming