Conclusion
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition is NVIDIA’s offering at $999, replacing the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER GPU at this price point. We’ve found that the GeForce RTX 5080 is quite a big step down from the GeForce RTX 5090 on performance, and also cut in half in price. While we did experience a performance upgrade over a GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER, it ultimately resulted in performance that was a bit underwhelming, especially compared to the previous generation GeForce RTX 4090.
We had the opportunity to also review a partner card, the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 16G VANGUARD SOC LAUNCH EDITION Video Card, which showed great potential with overclocking on the GeForce RTX 5080. That particular video card achieved all the way up to 3.2GHz stable, with Voltage and a higher TDP increase. This gave us some hope for the GeForce RTX 5080, or at least improved its standing in value based on this new level of performance. In today’s review, we took the Founders Edition GeForce RTX 5080 for a spin to see how it would overclock. We utilized the latest release driver and MSI Afterburner to push it as hard as possible to see if this is innate to the GeForce RTX 5080 GPU.
Overclocking Summary
In our overclocking, we were able to increase the Power Limit by 8%, which does end up being slightly lower than what is possible on the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 VANGUARD SOC video card. That video card allowed up to an 11% TDP increase. We were also able to increase the Voltage on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition, which actually worked great. It’s just that with a smaller 8% TDP power limit increase, the overall limit of power is reached sooner, and thus it doesn’t become advantageous to enable a higher Voltage on the GPU. Case in point, you will see on the previous page in GPU-Z, without any Voltage increase, we are already hitting 108% TDP power limit with our overclock, not touching the Voltage.
The end result was a +350 to the GPU frequency on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition. This is slightly lower than the +380 that we achieved with the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 VANGUARD SOC video card. We do think that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition would actually be able to be clocked higher, had it the same TDP power limit potential as the partner overclocked card, however, it does not. That said, some fine-tuning of Voltage, perhaps even undervolting, could create a scenario of obtaining higher clock speeds on the GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition, which is exciting.
On the memory side of things, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition already runs at a high 30Gbps memory frequency. The GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition for example runs at 28Gbps. We achieved an overclock of up to 31Gbps on that video card, and thus we also achieved 31Gbps on the GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition. They both overclock to the same level on memory frequency, but the GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition is starting from a higher frequency, to begin with, so it has less room to scale on the memory overclock, therefore we got a small bandwidth increase.
Overall, the overclock that we achieved was a very respectful 3.1GHz frequency, with an average of 3124MHz, which is a 12.6% GPU frequency overclock compared to the default frequency. The MSI GeForce RTX 5080 VANGUARD SOC video card achieved an even higher 3.2GHz frequency overclock, and memory overclock as well. This is a very healthy overclock on the GeForce RTX 5080 from two video cards so far, showing that yes, the GeForce RTX 5080 does have some good overclocking headroom.
Final Points
The short summary is that yes, overclocking the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition can improve its performance by around 7-9%, and that does improve its standing at the $999 price point. However, even when it was overclocked, it was still unable to equalize performance with the GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition, except for one game, Cyberpunk 2077, in raster performance. Otherwise, the GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition does remain the leader in performance still, even with the GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition Overclocked.
What overclocking the GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition does is provide a greater uplift over the previous generation GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER FE. For example, in Alan Wake 2, the GeForce RTX 5080 FE at default is 11% faster than the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER FE, which isn’t much. However, when it is overclocked, it is now 19% faster than the GeForce RTX 4080 FE, which is pretty much more in line with what was originally expected.
If you go back and look through all the games, you’ll see that overclocking does make the GeForce RTX 5080, at the $999 price point, appear more appealing, in that comparison at least. The downside, of course, is a greater power draw, but it does seem to scale well and linearly with the performance increase.
What we can conclude is that the GeForce RTX 5080 (Founders Edition), and perhaps all, have a good potential for hardware enthusiast tweaking and overclocking. There’s headroom with the GPU, more than the GeForce RTX 5090 had, a lot more. Enthusiasts should enjoy overvolting, or even undervolting, to hone in higher sustainable clock frequencies. It shouldn’t be too hard to get to 3.1-3.2GHz out of it.
It is also interesting because this gives NVIDIA’s partners headroom to create a higher factory overclocked series that may actually result in some performance differences versus the Founders Edition. With the extra headroom, there is room for some uber-overclocked versions, probably with uber-prices to go along with them. It also makes you ask the question, could NVIDIA have clocked it a little higher in the end, to provide better performance at default? Perhaps. At any rate, NVIDIA targeted 360W, and at default, that is what it indeed pulls, and any clock speed above that will demand more power (maybe we would have been ok with this being a 400W card if it were faster?)
Overall, the GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition overclocked very easily, and it kept its cool while doing so. It achieved a high frequency, and we see the potential for partner cards to offer higher overclocked models, but beware of pricing, the GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition’s value is best at MSRP.