Firstly, we have to talk about the quietness of this card. Among the third-party RTX 3080 cards, which are generally already pretty quiet, the Gaming X Trio is noticeably the quietest. It doesn’t increase RPM until necessary, and, as a result, the fans are nearly silent and can only be heard when you press your ear to the case. To bolster the specialized roles of the center and auxiliary fans, the rotational direction of the center fan is reversed. This reduces air turbulence inside the cooling array for another boost to overall thermal performance. The fans also shut off completely when card power consumption is low and the GPU temperature falls beneath 50 Celsius, keeping noise levels down when the system is under a light load.

Below are the higher resolution results starting with 2560×1440 and the gaining in popularity 3840×2160 (4K UHD). These resolutions prove to be a bit of a stretch for some cards, but an Ampere-based RTX 3080 had no issues running either setting.

Board Design

slot design expands cooling surface area compared to last gen for more thermal headroom than ever before. The new setup uses a massive 2.9 slot heatsink to disperse the 320W+ loads with a whopping seven heat pipes that meander through the huge fin array moving the heat from the surface of the polished heat spreader distributing the load throughout. Air is moved through the heatsink via three axial fans – where Asus has increased the blade count to a total of 13 on the center and 11 on the auxiliary fans. The axial style fans also use a smaller barrier ring than previous generations which is said to allow for more lateral intake and provide increased airflow through the array. The center fan’s additional blades, full-height barrier ring, and blade count increase static pressure pushing air directly onto the GPU heat spreader. However, the results of benchmarks vary, not only from the other hardware components but also from the benchmarking tool, so take them with a grain of salt. In comparison to the previous generation’s ROG Strix card, which was pretty big in its own right, this model is significantly larger. This might have been expected due to the RTX 3080’s massive performance upgrade. Needless to say, it’s bigger than the Founders Edition, but it’s worth pointing out that, although it technically only needs two slots, this is a 3-slot card.

Zotac used its IceStorm 2.0 cooler for this card, and this is probably the reason why its version performs better in the cooling department. The 3-fan design, along with a new heat pipe layout, have outperformed the FE card. Given how NVIDIA touted its new fan design, this is a massive win for Zotac. Our Thoughts EVGA’s ICX technology has been its signature since the GTX 10 series and has been improved with each iteration. The three fans are able to automatically and individually adjust their RPM based on those ICX sensors and thus have more precise control over the heat.Axial-tech Fan Design has been tuned up with more fan blades and a reversed rotational direction for the center fan.