Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 review: More like a 4080 Super Super

The strategy with the 5080 looks pretty similar. You get a mild increase in core count (up 10.5 percent over the original 4080 and only 5 percent over the 4080 Super), plus the same 16GB of RAM on the same 256-bit memory interface. Switching from GDDR6X to GDDR7 does get you a decent bump to memory bandwidth, though, on the order of just over 30 percent compared to the 4080 and 4080 Super.

But all of that is incredibly mild and incremental compared to the big across-the-board jumps in core count, memory bus width, memory size, and memory bandwidth that you get when you go from the RTX 4090 to the RTX 5090. The 5080’s core counts and memory bandwidth also stay well below the RTX 4090’s. This has the benefit of not blowing up the 5080’s power requirements—at 360 W, it’s only 40 W higher than the 4080, and in our actual testing, the 5080 didn’t actually consume that much more power on average—but it also means that the 4090 and 5090 continue to stand apart from the rest of the lineup, inaccessible to anyone with less than a couple thousand dollars to spend on a GPU.

As for the physical design of Nvidia’s Founders Edition version of the 5080, it’s identical to that of the 5090, just as the 4080 looked like the 4090. The 5080 does feel lighter than the 5090, which makes some sense—a card with much lower power consumption and half as many CUDA cores doesn’t need the same kind of cooling apparatus. But the dimensions and connectors on both cards are exactly the same.

In our testing, the 5080 ran a little warmer than the 4080 did under load, but only by about 5° Celsius. The 5080 Founders Edition runs 11° or 12° cooler than the 5090 Founders Edition, so it should be a bit easier to keep your system cool with one of these installed.

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