by Asus’ latest big-boi GPU is the TUF Gaming RTX 4080 Super, a reasonably priced overclocked reference card from classic board partner Nvidia. So it’s a $999 GPU, $200 less than the original RTX 4080, but with basically the same performance. Job done. And if you can’t get your hands on the Nvidia RTX 4080 Super Founders Edition version of the latest GeForce card, then I’d suggest the Asus is as good as any MSRP GPU you’ll find.
Since Nvidia introduced its Founders Editions as the built-in GeForce reference option for its latest graphics cards – and not the pricier premium option it was in the RTX 20 series – the FE cards are the ones we recommend. Nvidia cards themselves are over-engineered to the point of excellence. They are quite, in a rather sparse way, and with this Super series they only look better.
They are also cooler and sometimes even quieter than the third party coolers, for example Asus, MSI, and Zotac will have extra jam on their GPUs. But they’re also the ones guaranteed to be stuck at the MSRP, so they’re the ones that will sell the fastest.
So, if you’re unlucky when picking up a Founder’s card, what do you do? I would still argue that, especially with this RTX 40 series sporting the efficient Ada architecture, you should only consider another card at Nvidia’s MSRP. Each add-on board partner will create many different versions of a new graphics card, and often many ‘premium’ options with over the top coolers, extreme lighting elements, and some sort of factory overclock to try to justify. the additional cost.
TUF Gaming RTX 4080 Excellent Specifications
GPU: Driver nvidia AD103
Lithography: TSMC 4N
Clock boost: OC mode 2,580MHz | 2,550MHz default
Core: 10240
SMS: 80
RT core: 80
Tensor core: 320
Memory: 16GB GDDR6X
Memory speed: 23Gbps
TGP: 320W
Price: $999
And they are not worth the extra money. Chris recently reviewed the Zotac RTX 4080 Super Amp Extreme Airo, a $1,100 version of Nvidia’s new card, and while it delivers a higher clock speed than the Founders Edition card, it’s only delivering another 5% higher clock speed for you on average. Which is only a handful of frames per second at best.
In other words, the additional factory overclock performance is negligible and, I would say, invisible to the end user.
Nvidia’s RTX 40 series is also very expensive. Even with the RTX 4080 Super seeing $200 dropped from its predecessor’s original $1,200 price tag, there’s still a lot of money to spend on a graphics card. And when that price cut is the biggest thing the RTX 4080 Super has to offer over the original RTX 4080, then you don’t want to eat into it by buying an expensive premium option with zero tangible benefits.
Hell, the overclocked Zotac card is much hotter and louder than the Founders card and, more importantly, than the MSRP Asus RTX 4080 Super, too.
This is the thing with modern Nvidia graphics cards, the Ada architecture is extremely efficient and the sort of hefty triple-slot + cooler that Asus is able to drop even its reference-price cards are going to be more than on a game for the powerful AD103 GPU. at the heart of the RTX 4080 Super.
So why pay more?
The RTX 4080 Super is the least interesting of the Super GPU refreshes when it comes to actual silicon changes.
There is not much to say about the architecture that describes this Asus RTX 4080 Super card. It’s using the same GPU as the RTX 4080, just with full streaming multiprocessor (SM) enabled this time. That means you get 80 SM instead of 76, and thus 10240 CUDA cores instead of 9728.
It’s also running 23Gbps GDDR6X memory instead of 22.4Gbps, giving it a little extra memory bandwidth for its 256-bit aggregate memory bus.
And that’s it. The RTX 4080 Super is the least interesting of the Super GPU refreshes when it comes to actual silicon changes, and also when it comes to performance gains. Nvidia’s new GPU is relying heavily on that $200 price drop to win it over.
This Asus TUF Gaming RTX 4080 Super gets a small clock speed bump in its OC mode, accessible via a slider attached to the PCB. The standard RTX 4080 Super boost clock is 2,550MHz, and the OC clock speed is rated at 2,580MHz. Although the dynamic nature of Nvidia’s GPU frequencies is a limitation, you’ll never notice as the chip will likely always be higher during gaming loads.
It’s only a 30MHz overclock, and on average we were actually seeing less than that in terms of the frequency advantage over the FE card in real-world benchmarking. But it was always much higher than the rated speeds that Asus gives out in the specs sheet at least.
But, what does all that mean in terms of performance? Well, not much, to be honest. The RTX 4080 Super FE is only about 1 – 2% faster than the original RTX 4080 and in my testing it’s even tighter between the older card and this Asus TUF version. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as the RTX 4080 Super is a very capable GPU, offering 4K gaming performance that you’d be really happy with even if it didn’t have the option to support DLSS 3 and Frame Generation.
I couldn’t care less how it looks if it performs in terms of frame rates, thermals, and acoustics. And the Asus ticks those boxes with aplomb.
Apart from the large radius that Cyberpunk 2077 tracks, that is. Even with the RTX 4090 you can only expect to see native frame rates of around 40 fps at Ultra 4K settings. But with the rest of our benchmark suite you’re looking at around 60 fps at worst and triple digits more often than not.
The competition for the RTX 4080 Super doesn’t really come from the different cards available from the different board partners, though. It comes from AMD. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX has always been laser-focused on the RTX 4080, able to trade blows with the GeForce GPU, riding high on raster performance but falling behind in ray-tracing workloads.
I would suggest that the prices are almost the same now, the AMD GPU has lost a lot of its edge. Now that it is more or less equal to the weight of support for DLSS 3 and Frame Generation, and the extended support for ray tracing as a whole, the scales would be tipping towards Nvidia’s choice.
In terms of the actual graphics card experience, even with the OC mode enabled, the Asus card manages it in a whisper quiet manner that you would never hear over the system fans on your PC. On our open test bed I have to stick my ear right next to the fans to hear them making sound even under full 4K loads.
Buy if…
✅ You cannot bag a Founder card: If you’re after an RTX 4080 Super, but all the FE cards are sold out, then another Asus MSRP offering at the same price is worth it.
✅ You need a significant upgrade to a previous gen card: Compared to the best the RTX 30 series had to offer, the RTX 4080 Super is way out ahead.
Do not buy if…
❌ You are not playing high resolution games: Don’t choose a $1,000 GPU to achieve high frame rates at 1080p. The RTX 4080 does its best work at 4K.
❌ You have patience: The Founders cards will come back in stock, and I would suggest that there is a good chance that the Super RTX 4080 cards will come back in stock fairly quickly after the first flow of FE options sell out.
But it’s not a nice card. It’s a 3.5-slot monster, despite what the dual-slot bracket might have you think. That chunky rectangular cooler spills out into a fourth slot in your computer. Small form factor card, then, this is not. It’s all fat heatsinks, big fans, and an angular shroud.
But, while I’ll admit that I’m impressed with the matte black finish of the RTX 4080 Super Founders Edition card, I really couldn’t care less about how it performs in terms of frame rates, thermals and acoustics. . And the Asus ticks those boxes with aplomb. Once a graphics card is accepted by my motherboard and locked inside my computer case I will always spend more time looking at my screen than gazing lovingly at the expensive slices of silicon inside my rig.
I still think $999 is an outrageous amount of money to charge for a graphics card, but the Super price correction at least puts the second-tier Ada card in a more reasonable position within the 40-tier RTX stack. You can read about my feelings for this series of GPU in the full RTX 4080 Super review. But regardless, I cannot, in good conscience, recommend anyone spend more than MSRP on a third-party card, especially when those MSRP cards can be so good.
Asus knows how to make a graphics card – and sure, it has its own premium-priced ROG versions – but the TUF Gaming RTX 4080 Super packs more than enough to make it a worthy choice for those who can’t afford a Founders Edition whose bag is being sought.
