A new low price for the faster 12GB variant of the RTX 3080.
The RTX 3080 12GB is a little-known variant of the RTX 3080 released late last year. As well as coming with the same memory subsystem as the RTX 3080 Ti - 12GB of GDDR6X attached to a 384-bit interface - it’s also faster than the vanilla 3080, with more CUDA and RT cores.
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 ourhallowed deal archives.
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!
