The images were initially leaked by Chiphell and soon picked up by the popular leakster site, Videocardz. From the looks of it, NVIDIA may be trying something with the cooling solution on the RTX 3080; it appears to be using a dual-fan cooling solution, but the cooler shroud design suggests unique fan orientation. Specifically, one fan will be positioned on the front of the card, as per usual, while the second fan is seen on the other side. Parallel to the back of the card, enabling both fans to blow air into the card from different directions.
There’s also the subject of the unique V-shaped heatsink the alleged RTX 3080 is sporting in one of the pictures. Instead of bolting fans directly on top of the heatsink – as graphics traditionally do – it looks like NVIDIA may have machine-cut a well directly into it, thus enabling one of the fans to have considerably closer contact with the GPU. Thus promoting and enabling better thermal efficiency and increasing performance, at least in theory. Oddly enough, the card in the picture doesn’t show the PCIe power connectors and on top of that, it looks as though the card could feature a new kind of NVLink connector at launch.
Beyond that, the images share no additional detail about the card, not even its default and boost clock speeds or graphics memory size. Of course, it is expected that when it does get its official launch, the card should be rocking NVIDIA’s next-generation Ampere GPU architecture. Of course, as per NVIDIA policy, it hasn’t commented on the subject. Sso until then, take this news with a very large grain of salt. (Source: Chiphell via Videocardz // Image: Chiphell)
