That performance normally comes at a steep premium, but today an MSI Ventus 3X RTX 3080 12GB model is going for a low price over at Newegg. They’re asking $810 for the graphics card after a $30 rebate, some $450 below the GPU’s ludicrously high MSRP. That makes this model actually cheaper than almost all RTX 3080 10GB cards on the market, and a worthy deal for our hallowed deal archives.
Get the MSI Ventus RTX 3080 12GB for $810 (after $30 rebate, was $1290)
In terms of the specs, let’s quickly run down the standard RTX 3080 10GB versus this RTX 3080 12GB. On the 12GB model, you get 8960 CUDA cores versus 8704, 12GB of GDDR6X versus 10GB, a 384-bit memory interface versus 320-bit, good for 912GB/s of memory bandwidth versus 760GB/s. That means you’ll see quite significant performance improvement over the standard RTX 3080 in VRAM-limited scenarios, which do pop up occasionally when gaming or for content creation. The price of this is slightly higher power consumption too - 350W versus 320W - but it doesn’t change Nvidia’s recommended power supply rating, which remains at 750W. So, how much does all that extra performance net you in games? I haven’t tested the card myself, as Nvidia haven’t sampled them, but the likes of Digital Trends report a 6% improvement to frame-rates - not massive, but not nothing either. If you work in content creation, you might also benefit from the larger VRAM allocation, as the 10GB afforded in the standard 3080 can easily be sucked up by 4K video editing, for example. In any case, given that this 12GB card is cheaper than most 10GB variants, I think the value discussion is somewhat moot! Anyway, I thought this was an interesting deal and I hope you agree. Thanks for joining us once again, and be sure to let me know if these kinds of deals are helpful or not. We’ll see you next time!
