Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge
Nvidia is promising big things with the GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. “Twice the performance” of the RTX 2080 is perhaps the biggest claim of them all, with pledges of a PC gaming breakthrough. While we’re still putting the RTX 3080 through its paces, here’s a closer look at what the actual hardware looks like.
Nvidia has switched to a new pennant-shaped board for the RTX 3080 and combined this PCB with a new cooling shroud. That means the RTX 3080 forms a figure of eight, with fans flanking either side. Nvidia is using a push-pull system here, with the left-hand fan acting more like a traditional blower cooler by exhausting air out of the PCIe slot. The right-hand fan pulls air into the card, which then exhausts on the opposite side…