Hardware 4all

Even if the GeForce RTX 3080 is generally only available in smaller quantities at the market, I want to offer nevertheless briefly from the market start of the KFA2 RTX 3080 SG still a suitable test of this Custom solution. In contrast to the rather narrow Founders Edition, KFA2 relies on the well-known 2.5-slot design and puts a card on the shelves that is supposed to offer a good compromise between performance and cost. However, the test will still have to prove how well this balancing act has been achieved.

First of all, a few key data about the GA102 chip used. The heart of this card is the GA102-200 graphics processor. It is based on Samsung’s 8nm process node designed specifically for NVIDIA and has a total of 28 billion transistors. It measures just under 628 mm², which makes it the second largest gaming GPU ever produced directly under the Turing TU102 GPU. The new shader cores of the Ampere architecture are 2.7x faster, the new RT cores 1.7x faster, while the new Tensor cores are up to 2.7x faster than their counterparts on Turing GPUs. The RT core of the 2nd. The 3rd generation also delivers dedicated hardware-accelerated ray tracing performance and offers twice the intersection of rays/triangles while providing RT graphics and arithmetic operations.

The case of the card is the well-known mix of light metal, plastic and magnetic hardware, which is haptically ok, and visually not too thick. The design with the 5.5 cm installation depth and the 4 mm backplate makes this card a 2.5 slot design with all known advantages and disadvantages. You can love it or hate it, but it doesn’t scare off in the form of this graphics card, the power comes from fuel, as is well known, and it has to be dissipated as waste heat.

With its 1350 grams, the Founders Edition is almost as heavy or light as the 1352 gram Founders Edition! Coincidences are… The length of 31.5 cm is already slightly above average, whereas the rather moderate installation height of only 10.5 cm from the upper edge of the PCIe slot with installed card to the top of the cover is nothing to be afraid of in a case. The funny 12-pin Micro-Fit 3.0 on the top side was replaced by two normal 8-pin sockets, the cooler was also cut out at this point to match. Of course, there is also a little bit of RGB lighting on the upper side.

On the one hand, the back side shows two threaded inserts for the optional attachment to a suitable graphic card stand or mount, on the other hand there are still mysterious looking sockets, but they aren’t that mysterious at all. Here you could also connect a “1-Click-Booster”, an optional 8cm fan module that you could plug into the air outlet on the back. For whatever reason. Impressive are also the 5 tailpipes in the shape of the 5 (of 6) 8 mm heatpipes.

The full test can be found here: