Palit GeForce RTX 3080 GameRock OC 10G Review

1. Introduction
2. Everything You Need to Know About Ampere
3. Palit marketing
4. Detailed Look
5. Test System Specs
6. Benchmarks - Synthetic
7. Benchmarks - 1080p
8. Benchmarks - 1440p
9. Benchmarks - 4K
10. Overclocking
11. Power Consumption & Temps
12. What's Hot, What's Not
13. Final Thoughts

TweakTown's Rating: 96%

The Bottom Line

It sure does have a specific style, but I actually really dig it -- the Palit GeForce RTX 3080 GameRock OC 10G definitely stand out in your gaming PC and give you kick ass performance.

Buy at Amazon

Introduction

This week has been a good week for custom GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards arriving at my door, with the COLORFUL iGame RTX 3080 Vulcan OC 10G-V -- and now Palit's rocked-out GeForce RTX 3080 GameRock OC 10G.

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Palit has some seriously blinged-out aesthetics on its GeForce RTX 3080 GameRock OC 10G, something that you're either going to love or hate. I really dig the style, because it just looks so damn different. It actually is really radically different, so much so that it becomes the instant star of any gaming PC.

After benchmarking the card for a few days and running it through its paces, I can easily tell you that the Palit GeForce RTX 3080 GameRock OC 10G has some of the best RTX 3080 performance you can get. It's up there with the custom ASUS, COLORFUL, and MSI GeForce RTX 3080 flagship cards.

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If you want some kick ass performance and team it with some G.SKILL Trident Z Royal RAM (as you can see in the above pic). You could have a seriously classy, and very powerful gaming PC with the Palit GeForce RTX 3080 GameRock OC 10G + G.SKILL Trident Z Royal RAM.

• MSI GeForce RTX 3070 GAMING X TRIO Review
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition Review
• ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3080 (OC Edition) review
• MSI GeForce RTX 3090 GAMING X TRIO review
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition review
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition review
• MSI GeForce RTX 3080 GAMING X TRIO review
• ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3080 Trinity review

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super Founders Edition Graphics Card

	Today	Yesterday	7 days ago	30 days ago
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Everything You Need to Know About Ampere

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• Ampere GPU architecture: NVIDIA has so much going on under the Ampere GPU hood, with the GA102 GPU packing a huge 28 billion transistors (that's 28,000,000,000) on the Samsung 8nm node. We have a huge 10496 CUDA cores on GA102, over double the 4608 CUDA cores on the TITAN RTX.
• RTX improvements: NVIDIA has effectively doubled everything when it comes to RTX, where it will rips and tears your games and delivers them to your eyeballs faster than ever before with Ampere. If you want to run any RTX-powered games, you'll want a new GeForce RTX 3080.
• GDDR6X memory: The new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 has 10GB of GDDR6X memory on a 320-bit memory bus, with a huge 760GB/sec of memory bandwidth. You should see the 4K gaming results for the evidence of the Ampere GPU + GDDR6X memory slaying it.

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• PCIe 4.0 connectivity: NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards are now PCIe 4.0 compatible, so if you're building a new AMD Ryzen 3000 series system with an X570 motherboard -- you will be ready to rock and roll with PCIe 4.0 connectivity.
• HDMI 2.1: 4K 120Hz + 8K 60Hz = single cable: If you are buying a new TV in the coming months or years, HDMI 2.1 is going to be something you want. It opens up the bandwidth floodgates to 4K 120Hz and 8K 60Hz over the single HDMI 2.1 cable.
• RTX IO: NVIDIA's introduction of RTX IO with Ampere is very similar to the ultra-fast game load times on the next-gen Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 consoles. You can read all about RTX IO right here, which is something we'll see build more foundation in 2021 and beyond.

Palit marketing

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Detailed Look

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Test System Specs

Latest upgrade:

Sabrent sent over their huge Rocket Q 8TB NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 SSD, which will be my new Games install SSD inside of my main test bed.

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I've got a new upgrade inside of my GPU test bed before my change to a next-gen test bed, where I will be preparing for NVIDIA's next-gen Ampere graphics cards and AMD's next-gen RDNA 2 graphics cards.

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Sabrent helped out with some new storage for my GPU test beds, sending over a slew of crazy-fast Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 SSDs. I've got this installed into my GPU test bed as the new Games Storage drive, since games are so damn big now. Thanks to Sabrent, I've got 2TB of super-fast M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD storage now.

Anthony's Test System Specifications

• Motherboard: GIGABYTE Z370 AORUS Gaming 7 (buy from Amazon)
• CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K @ 5GHz (buy from Amazon)
• Cooler: Corsair Hydro Series H115i PRO (buy from Amazon)
• Memory: 16GB (2x8GB) HyperX Predator DDR4-2933 (buy from Amazon)
• SSD: Sabrent Rocket Q 2TB NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 (buy from Amazon)
• SSD: 1TB Toshiba OCZ RD400 NVMe M.2 (buy from Amazon)
• SSD: 512GB Toshiba OCZ RD400 NVMe M.2 (buy from Amazon)
• Power Supply: InWin 1065W
• Case: InWin X-Frame
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (buy from Amazon)

Additional Images

Benchmarks - Synthetic

3DMark Fire Strike

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3DMark has been a staple benchmark for years now, all the way back to when The Matrix was released and Futuremark had bullet time inspired benchmarks. 3DMark is the perfect tool to see if your system - most important, your CPU and GPU - is performing as it should. You can search results for your GPU, to see if it falls in line with other systems based on similar hardware.

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3DMark TimeSpy

Heaven - 1080p

Heaven is an intensive GPU benchmark that really pushes your silicon to its limits. It's another favorite of ours as it has some great scaling for multi-GPU testing, and it's great for getting your GPU to 100% for power and noise testing.

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Benchmarks - 1080p

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Middle-earth: Shadow of War is a sequel to the popular Shadow of Mordor, which was powered by the Lithtech engine. When cranked up to maximum detail, it will chew through your GPU and its VRAM like it's nothing.

You can buy Middle-earth: Shadow of War at Amazon.

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Metro Exodus is one of the hardest tests that our graphics cards have to go through, with 4A Games' latest creation being one of the best looking games on the market. It is a serious test that pushes GPUs to their limits, and also features RTX technologies like DLSS.

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Shadow of the Tomb Raider is one of the latest games to join our graphics card benchmark lineup, with the game built using the Foundation engine as a base, the same engine in Rise of the Tomb Raider. Eidos Montreal R&D department made lots of changes to the engine during the development of Shadow of the Tomb Raider to make it one of the best-looking games out right now.

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1080p Benchmark Performance Thoughts

I would not recommend buying the GeForce RTX 3080 for 1080p gaming, period. I almost don't even want to discuss performance thoughts at this resolution because you'd be nuts to buy the RTX 3080 for 1920 x 1080.

We have a few more FPS over the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition in most of the games and testing, with the MSI RTX 3080 GAMING X TRIO breaching 244FPS average in DOOM Eternal on the Ultra Nightmare preset.

Benchmarks - 1440p

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Middle-earth: Shadow of War is a sequel to the popular Shadow of Mordor, which was powered by the Lithtech engine. When cranked up to maximum detail, it will chew through your GPU and its VRAM like it's nothing.

You can buy Middle-earth: Shadow of War at Amazon.

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Metro Exodus is one of the hardest tests that our graphics cards have to go through, with 4A Games' latest creation being one of the best looking games on the market. It is a serious test that pushes GPUs to their limits, and also features RTX technologies like DLSS.

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Shadow of the Tomb Raider is one of the latest games to join our graphics card benchmark lineup, with the game built using the Foundation engine as a base, the same engine in Rise of the Tomb Raider. Eidos Montreal R&D department made lots of changes to the engine during the development of Shadow of the Tomb Raider to make it one of the best-looking games out right now.

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1440p Benchmark Performance Thoughts

I would not recommend buying the GeForce RTX 3080 for 1080p gaming, period. I almost don't even want to discuss performance thoughts at this resolution because you'd be nuts to buy the RTX 3080 for 1920 x 1080.

We have a few more FPS over the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition in most of the games and testing, with the MSI RTX 3080 GAMING X TRIO breaching 244FPS average in DOOM Eternal on the Ultra Nightmare preset.

Benchmarks - 4K

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Middle-earth: Shadow of War is a sequel to the popular Shadow of Mordor, which was powered by the Lithtech engine. When cranked up to maximum detail, it will chew through your GPU and its VRAM like it's nothing.

You can buy Middle-earth: Shadow of War at Amazon.

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Metro Exodus is one of the hardest tests that our graphics cards have to go through, with 4A Games' latest creation being one of the best looking games on the market. It is a serious test that pushes GPUs to their limits, and also features RTX technologies like DLSS.

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Shadow of the Tomb Raider is one of the latest games to join our graphics card benchmark lineup, with the game built using the Foundation engine as a base, the same engine in Rise of the Tomb Raider. Eidos Montreal R&D department made lots of changes to the engine during the development of Shadow of the Tomb Raider to make it one of the best-looking games out right now.

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4K Benchmark Performance Thoughts

I would not recommend buying the GeForce RTX 3080 for 1080p gaming, period. I almost don't even want to discuss performance thoughts at this resolution because you'd be nuts to buy the RTX 3080 for 1920 x 1080.

We have a few more FPS over the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition in most of the games and testing, with the MSI RTX 3080 GAMING X TRIO breaching 244FPS average in DOOM Eternal on the Ultra Nightmare preset.

Overclocking

Palit's new GeForce RTX 3080 GameRock OC is one of the fastest custom RTX 3080s out of the box, with boost GPU clocks hitting 1950MHz which is impressive. The card ran at 65C at this point, with the fans at 43% so the card wasn't loud at all.

I could easily overclock up to a stable 2025MHz or so, with the card peaking above 2100MHz but wasn't stable in every single test. Your results will vary with any of these cards, so I don't like spending too much time convincing you to buy this card over any other card with its OC ability.

But, you're not going to be disappointed at all, the card stomps all over the place.

Power Consumption & Temps

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Palit is keeping things ice cool, which is funny considering the ice/crystal-themed design on the GeForce RTX 3080 GameRock OC 10G -- with the card running at just 65C under load while when the card is overclocked and fans at 100% the card drops to just 59C.

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As for power consumption, the entire system is consuming 460W under load with the Palit GeForce RTX 3080 GameRock OC 10G graphics card.

What's Hot, What's Not

What's Hot

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Brutal performance: You get beyond GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition level performance here with the Palit GeForce RTX 3080 GameRock OC graphics card. If you tweak it well, you will hit a very nice boost clock without the card breaking a sweat really.

Let it go, let it goooo: Palit went with an ice-style look, which gives me some weird Frozen meets the Fortress of Solitude from Superman vibes. I actually love all of the custom cards in their own way, but that's because I'm a major graphics card nerd. The look and style will come down to you personally, but I dig what Palit is doing here.

What's Not

Out-of-the-box troubles: This isn't really a "What's Not" but more of a "this happened to me". This isn't going to happen to you because you will have probably not even been able to buy this graphics card anywhere on Earth before you read this. I checked before I wrote this review and couldn't find a review on the card.

So this will be a warning to everyone: the new drivers that are out fix the issue that the Palit RTX 3080 GameRock OC was experiencing, because NVIDIA is reducing GPU clocks at a software level in its latest GeForce drivers. This makes the Palit card stable, whereas the launch drivers that I've been using for weeks now make the card unstable without manually downclocking it.

Once again, I will be re-looking at the card with the new drivers in an upcoming GeForce RTX 3080 Roundup article.

Final Thoughts

Palit hits a home run with its GeForce RTX 3080 GameRock OC 10G, with it being one of the best custom cards I've tested so far. It definitely has the most unique style, so as a huge Superman fan I feel some very strong Fortress of Solitude vibes -- but also Frozen is so powerful I'm getting some of those Let It Go vibes, too.

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You're going to get a different card to what I'm testing here, but it's not going to be much different -- somewhere in the 15-30MHz difference, which let's face it -- you're not going to notice a difference in performance.

The main thing you have here is performance that beats NVIDIA's own GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition, with much improved thermals and some great OC potential with style that is unmatched. Palit's new GeForce RTX 3080 GameRock OC 10G is unique-looking RTX 3080, something that if you like style of, is a must buy.

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All-in-all, you're going to get that kick ass GeForce RTX 3080 performance with some aesthetics flair that isn't quite matched on the market right now. Palit... thank you for doing something very different here with the GeForce RTX 3080 GameRock OC 10G!