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Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition
For this review, Nvidia provided us with its RTX 5080 Founders Edition, the reference model that will sell for $999 MSRP — while supplies last. We’ve already seen the cards at CES 2025, and from the outside, the RTX 5080 looks effectively the same as the RTX 5090. Under the hood, there are differences — in the PCB, GPU, memory, VRMs, etc. — but the cooler is otherwise the same.
It’s unclear if the new packaging we’ve seen with the 5090 Founders Edition and now the 5080 Founders Edition will be for all buyers or if it’s a special design being sent to reviewers and influencers. We assume it’s for everyone, and Nvidia uses environmentally friendly packaging, with no inks or plastics and a box made of recycled paper fibers.The 5080 Founders Edition card weighs 1643g, about 180g less than the 5090’s 1826g. Some of that weight goes to the additional GDDR7 chips, VRMs, and the larger GPU die. The 5090 FE also uses liquid metal and likely has some other upgrades to help it cope with up to 215W more power and heat than the 5080 FE. But weight notwithstanding, the card measures the same 304x137x40 mm — which is also the same dimensions as the prior generation 4080 and 4080 Super, except those (and the 4090) were triple-slot cards that were 61mm thick.Aesthetically, the 5090 and 5080 FE cards also look the same, with a dark gray and black design and silver accents. There’s an angled 16-pin 12V-2x6 connector on top, and Nvidia provides a triple-8-pin to 16-pin adapter with the 5080. As with the 5090 adapter, the cables are individually sheathed and far more flexible this time.
We were surprised with the cooling performance of Nvidia’s 5090 Founders Edition, and we suspect the removal of liquid metal thermal interface material (TIM) won’t really affect the 5080 Founders Edition much, since it has a much lower TGP (Total Graphics Power) rating. The dual 115mm fans with flow-through radiators should be more than enough to help cool the up to 360W GPU. Ventilation slots on the top and bottom of the card help to direct the exhaust away from the fan intakes to minimize recycling the warmed-up air.Nvidia has switched to a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot connector with the Blackwell cards announced so far, which you may tell by the “T” markings on the gold fingers. It also offers three DisplayPort 2.1b UHBR20 outputs, which allow up to 4K 480Hz or 8K 165Hz (using DSC — Display Stream Compression). There’s also a single HDMI 2.1 output that can do up to 4K 240Hz / 8K 120Hz. Curiously, the DP ports are all reversed (angled notch down rather than up) compared to virtually every GPU we’ve tested in the past decade.Like the 5090, Nvidia provides minimalistic RGB lighting on the 5080 FE. The GeForce logo on top of the card lights up, and the “X” shapes also have lighting on both sides of the card. By default, all the lighting is white, but it can be controlled through various software utilities.
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Jarred Walton is a senior editor at Tom’s Hardware focusing on everything GPU. He has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge ‘3D decelerators’ to today’s GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance.
