The ASUS TUF has always been a solid choice, whether it was a motherboard or graphics card. All overclocking settings are enabled from the start and the look is characterised by 90s military symbolism, but also functional, machine-like, and not least something industrial. It'll resonate with most people, regardless of their age, and they call the design a "ventilated exoskeleton".
With the 5000 Series, ASUS does not disappoint. They haven't gone down to a 2-slot design like Nvidia's own reference cards, no, they've gone up to a 3.6-slot size, so yes, it's massive (35x15x7 cm) and not SFF suitable in any way, and weighs in at just under 2 kg. Not least, the skeleton-like blow-through cooling design has been retained, which honestly is pretty good if you have the space.
The entire card has been sprayed to be protected against moisture and dust, there's a large evaporation chamber in the centre, phase-changing thermal pads, and yes, they liquefy for more optimal contact. It has a dual BIOS and it comes with the GPU Tweak III software, which is pretty good too. The best parts, however, are the ASUS Axial Fans with double floating ball bearings and where the two outer ones rotate in opposite directions, and they have so little internal resistance that they start spinning when you simply lift the card.
As you'd expect from an ASUS TUF product, these are solid circuit boards, as well as individual electronic components that are extra resilient to temperature changes and vibrations. It also makes me happy when ASUS talks about an improved manufacturing process that enhances the cooling solution and lowers the temperature. Yet, the required space is the card's main problem. The power connector points outwards towards the side of the case and an adapter is included, with this being a 3x8pin with a braided outer skirt that is quite tough, meaning it needs space.
In return, you get all the good stuff: 16GB DDR7 RAM, 10752 CUDA Cores, 960 GB/s RAM bandwidth, 336 Tensor Cores and 84 Ray-Tracing Cores. This is on top of the Blackwell platform, which out of the box gives you DLSS 4 with the significantly better Transformer model upscaling and the Blackwell-exclusive Multi Frame Generation that provides up to three computed frames for every rendered image. There's a lot more to the Blackwell platform and the RTX 5000 Series technically, but we'll just stick to the practicalities here.
The price is not officially known, but the ASUS TUF edition of an RTX 5090 costs exactly the same as Nvidia's Founder Edition, so we dare to guess that the price of this 5080 variant will be similar to Nvidia's equivalent graphics card, which is around $999/£979. That's a lot less than what the RTX 4080 card sold for back in the day, so that's worth extra points.
And now for the fun part.
We measured a minimum temperature of 27 degrees Celsius and a maximum temperature of 62 degrees Celsius. That's by far the lowest of any 5000 Series card we've tested yet, and even though the SPL metre said 40.2 dB, it was so low-frequency that it wasn't really audible. That's brilliant performance. The card clocked out at 2677 MHz and a power consumption of 360.87 W, which means the ASUS fans must be pretty efficient.
The benchmarks are quite reasonable and alternate between being slightly above or slightly below the reference card from Nvidia, where it depends a lot on the specific usage. The test is done with beta drivers, so with any luck the numbers will be even higher for those who buy the card after it's officially released. The same applies to the ratio to the RTX 5090, as there is anywhere between 30-50% difference depending on the application, but due to the price of the RTX 5090, this is considered to be the de-facto high-end card of them all at the moment.
Benchmark Cinematic, 4K DLSS
Total War: Warhammer III still doesn't use any assistive technology and is hard on the CPU and GPU, and it's still a long way from an RTX 5090 delivering over 161 FPS in 4K.
Ultra settings, Ray-Tracing Ultra/ DLSS 4 + Multi Frame Generation:
4K Extreme with and without DLSS:
Despite DLSS 4 making a significant difference here, it's still crazy that it can't crawl above 60 FPS without help so long after release.
4K Ultra Quality, with and without DLSS:
Here was a solid implementation of DLSS 4. There were no artefacts or anything else, and it was virtually impossible to tell the difference to native rendering, except for the very low framerate.
4K Ultra Quality, full Ray-Tracing:
Another successful integration, but also a grotesque example that you can't get 60 FPS natively with a graphics card costing this much money.
With and without DLSS:
It's not far off an RTX 5090 here. And it's close that I highly doubt it makes a difference to anyone. An excellent title that serves as an example that the most expensive cards don't necessarily mean the best performance.
4K with and without DLSS:
4K with and without DLSS with Frame Generation:
All in all, ASUS may have made a shockingly large card, but it's quiet and cold as the grave. If you want an RTX 5080, and you will if you have an RTX 30 or weaker RTX 40 Series card, then this is extremely ideal for those who want to game in 4K, especially if you can accept Frame Generation. You don't have to set it to 3x extra frames, but once you've seen the difference compared to the new Transformer model, it hardly matters. But there's enough power to make it unnecessary, and DLSS Performance or Balanced is often sufficient.