Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 review: a powerful GPU with a big pricing problem
There's going to be a lot of criticism aimed at Nvidia's new RTX 4080 but it's important to stress that there is nothing wrong with the Founders Edition we are reviewing today in terms of its construction, features and overall quality. Just like the RTX 4090, it's a quality product created by a company that's arguably at the top of its game, a firm at the pioneering forefront of graphics technology. Pricing is a different matter, however. It's simply too high, even at its MSRP baseline and especially so with some of the third party partner cards we've seen. The product is a good chunk faster than any of the prior Nvidia Ampere offerings, including the RTX 3090 Ti, but the performance boost doesn't always correlate with the price being charged, to the point where there are data points to suggest that the $1599 RTX 4090 actually offers a better deal.
The Founders Edition we're looking at today arrives in the same packaging as the RTX 4090 and in the same excellent casing. The only difference is that while the same controversial 12VHPWR socket is on the card (yes, the melting one - and we're still waiting for definitive answers on why that happened) but this time you get a dongle adapter with just three eight-pin PCIe inputs. That's still more than enough, bearing in mind that the much more power-hungry RTX 3090 Ti shipped with the same adapter - and the RTX 4090 worked with it too. The uniform design across both Ada Lovelace cards also means that you're getting the same video options: one HDMI 2.1 and three DisplayPort 1.4a ports.