u/TheFlyingPancake3

Eat my shorts. I ate all your CDs and still triumphed.

-Ball main.

POWER OVERWHELMING.

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Please include the year so I can peg the hardwire to the year.

For me, 1996~, prebuilt, although that term didn't exist back then.

• Pentium I 100Mhz
• 8MB of RAM
• Soundblaster soundcard and two ivory 10watt speakers.
• HDD, I don't remember. I remember pushing past 1gig was a big milestone. I prob had 500mb.
• 16" CRT monitor @ 640 x 480. I remember few years later, 1024x768 became the standard for quite some time because of its big resolution, kind of like how 1920x1080 is staying for a long time today.
• I remember Diablo1 and Deckard Cain's "Hello, stay awhile", playing at the native 640 x 480.
• I worked all summer at Staples and splurged to go from 8mb to a whopping 64mb RAM which was WAY ahead of the curve which completely elminated all kinds of harddrive crunching / lagging.

I remember my buddy had Pentium I 133Mhz and it was a huge difference in performance. MP3 compression didn't even exist back then- laggy-ass .WAV files....

I'm sure there are far older folks than I with monochrome displays and 286 processors.

Please include the year so I can peg the hardwire to the year.

For me, 1996~, prebuilt, although that term didn't exist back then.

• Pentium I 100Mhz
• 8MB of RAM
• Soundblaster soundcard and two ivory 10watt speakers.
• HDD, I don't remember. I remember pushing past 1gig was a big milestone. I prob had 250mb.
• CD-Rom drive and 3.5" floppy drives. Us teenagers used to share floppy disks of Doom shareware or Warcraft II demo during class, long before the CD burners.
• 16" CRT monitor @ 640 x 480. I remember few years later, 1024x768 became the standard for quite some time because of its big resolution, kind of like how 1920x1080 is staying for a long time today.
• I remember Diablo1 and Deckard Cain's "Hello, stay awhile", playing at the native 640 x 480.
• I worked all summer at Staples and splurged to go from 8mb to a whopping 64mb RAM which was WAY ahead of the curve which completely elminated all kinds of harddrive crunching / lagging.

I remember my buddy had Pentium I 133Mhz and it was a huge difference in performance. MP3 compression didn't even exist back then- laggy-ass .WAV files....

I'm sure there are far older folks than I with monochrome displays and 286 processors and turbo buttons.

I bought the cheapest small-form-factor Gigabyte RTX 5080 Windforce against my will due to price and what's in stock ($1179 USD).

• Stock: Steel Nomad 8710.
• Max OC: Steel Nomad 9747 (Excellent) +410/2250/110%pwr/+100volt @ 79c room temp.
• Stable OC: Steel Nomad 9385 (Good) +350/2000/107%pwr/+75volt @ 79c room temp
• UV: Steel Nomad 9279 (Good) 975mV@2950~/2000/107%pwr/volt - GPU Power 385W down to 340W. That's a 45W (11%~) of power drop while only losing 3% fps~ vs the stable OC.

I'm mentioning RDR2 because it's very sensitive to OC/UV crashing:

• Stock 94 fps / Stable OC 101 fps / UW 96 fps at 4K maxed with preset K-Q.

Fan Control has been my hero. The GPU would run super pitchy loud with their crappy SFF fans which was worse than my 4080S'. I've capped the fan to 40% while performing all the benchmarks above and it's been breezy and quiet, delivering more performance.

tl;dr bigger GPUs are better, but SFF OCs just fine in a desktop case and runs quiet with FanControl.

I bought the cheapest small-form-factor Gigabyte RTX 5080 Windforce against my will due to price and what's in stock ($1179 USD).

• Stock: Steel Nomad 8710.
• Max OC: Steel Nomad 9747 (Excellent) +410/2250/110%pwr/+100volt @ 75c room temp.
• Stable OC: Steel Nomad 9385 (Good) +350/2000/107%pwr/+75volt @ 75c room temp
• UV: Steel Nomad 9279 (Good) 975mV@2950~/2000/107%pwr/volt - GPU Power 385W down to 340W. That's a 45W (11%~) of power drop while only losing 3% fps~ vs the stable OC. Temp diff is 2-5c cooler.

I'm mentioning RDR2 because it's very sensitive to OC/UV crashing:

• Stock 94 fps / Stable OC 101 fps / UW 96 fps at 4K maxed with preset K-Q.

Fan Control has been my hero. The GPU would run super pitchy loud with their crappy SFF fans which was worse than my 4080S'. I've capped the fan to 40% while performing all the benchmarks above and it's been breezy quiet delivering more performance.

2700 boost, 2750 OC model, etc.

My cheapest 5080 with the small form factor I didn't want has 9747 Steel Nomad top 3% score. 425/2250

Although stable is much lower at 360/1750 based on very sensitive games (RDR2 and CP2077).

4080Super was released in January 2024 and it finally became easily buyable late Spring. Even went $50 below MSRP ($949)... All just before the AI boom

More than two yrs later, we pay $1200-1400 now for a 5080 for 9.5% boost and the same ram is insane.

Also when 5080 was released, there was a meme going around that only the reviewers got the card. The sub was full of everyone complaining. It took I think .. 6 months? Until you could easily pick one up.

If 5080 Super is speculated to be released in Jan 2027, then adjust your expectations to a May and June 2027 realistically

Just like the 5080s, our previous cycle.

You young'uns don't remember when PC gaming used to be actually niche, far behind Nintendo, Sega, and Sony.

Hot girls streaming showing boobs while streaming PC gaming and can talk the hardware talk = does not compute

Anyways, don't let AI fool you. The GPUs aren't sitting on the shelves but they're still selling out.

Back in muh day if Nvidia slipped with their bad generation, everyone flocked to the competition Ati / amd. That just made me realize how much weaker the footing of AMD is.

See? You're witnessing the textbook monopoly at play.

The market is correcting itself and unfortunately they got to find out they can squeeze more out of consumers in the GPU market.

As you may know, there's a huge diminishing return of thermal cooling while having loud AF fan speed by motherboard / windows default.

You can use Fan Control app for free, like Winrar or Winzip. You can use the app live on your windows and adjust all the fans in your PCs to a whisper quiet 15-40% fan speed and it'll be 85-90% as cold as very loud speeds. Yes you can do this in the motherboard BIOS, but that's very cumbersome when this app you can adjust between gaming, benchmarking, working, browsing (silent mode), etc.

Today, I finally realized you can click "override" and actually control the GPU fans as well! This is amazing because I had to buy a 5080 Small Form Factor GPU which was smaller than my huge 4080S. The card performs beautifully, but the fans are pitchy and sounds like that metallic whirr of a Delta airline taking off while sitting in your cabin.

Well, thanks to fan control, I hard cap it at 40% fan speed because it audibly made that awful pitch from around 50% speed and up and down to 60%. Well the GPU is now quiet and the temps are just fine at low 70s and lower demanding games (Elden Ring 4K max) are a 0 difference while it's a gentle fan breeze sound coming out of my PC overall.

10/10. Try them. Oh, you can control all of your case fans - front and back whereever.

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I bought the cheapest Gigabyte 5080 Windforce SFF (small form factor) which is smaller than my 4080S by a big margin. Sigh.

It says "excellent" with a dotted line and a green line with a curve. Not sure which is which.

375/1750/105pwr truly stable here with the Gigabyte Windforce 5080 SFF model. This nets a healthy 9.5% fps boost at 4K.

How can I achieve more? I mean they make the GPUs huge for a reason right? I should be happy with my smaller SFF design pulling weight at a cheaper price right?

RDR2 anyway. Can you please name actual titles where there are 20% gains? Let us know so we can chase those games for the added excitement.

I sold the 4080S and was able to buy the Gigabyte Windforce 5080 SFF for $140 after tax.

The Small form factor is the cheapest 5080 they had at $1179. I still think GPUs selling way above MSRP is a recently widespread phenomenon which is anti consumer.

Anyways. It's noticeably smaller than my 4080 Super which was a beast. Also no lights of any kind... I kind of miss the clean white LED of the PNY 4080S.

Here is the skinny:

+ RDR2 on the same settings is a 9.5% uplift (85 fps to 94). Which is what I expected but...

+ 400/2000mhz overclock made it real sweet with ANOTHER un-ignorable 9.5% uplift at 103 fps (94 to 103)

+ From 4080S, that's a total uplift of 21%! That's a genuine generational upgrade thanks to the overclocking.

And it's stable considering RDR2 is most sensitive to OC and first to fail.

There is one downside though... The SFF GPU fans are awful. It's pitchy and moderately louder than my 4080S's beefy lower buzz fans.

(Edit)Thanks to a redditor here I have capped the GPU fans to 40% while staying 68-72C. Problem literally solved. Thanks!

How is this smaller GPU cooler than my old 4080S full size card that was hitting 75C? I think the new thermal padding is at play too.

9 out of 10 upgrade for the purchase and moving the needle a bit further as the GTA6 PC comes out in 2 yrs.

Overall I'll gladly take it!

Man, I have an ability to do this, but I'm not sure if $120 is worth the ~8-12% increase at 4K.