GFX CARD UPGRADE - RTX-3080

TIME FOR A BIG UPGRADE

As flightsims grow bigger and bigger, frame-rates shrink further and further. It was time to make an upgrade. Looking around at the new RTX cards, it was clear that it was going to cost a small fortune. Availability (or lack of) was driving prices up to crazy levels. No use whinging about it though - it is what it is and if you want the top card, you gotta pay the top dollar.

I ended up getting a great price for my 1080 card and replaced it with an ASUS RTX 3080 TUF OC 10GB 'TUF GAMING'.

It gives me 4K Ultra High Def. This will make FS2020 look absolutely awesome maxed out at 3840 x 2160. This RTX model is the OverClocked version and is about as good as it gets for the money.

It's a monster of a card and is all-metal construction. It weighs a ton and one does worry about the weight of such a beast - I feel like it could do with a vertical support at the end of it. Performance is a given at this spec - it just screams along at a blistering pace no matter what you throw at it. 

You can get as much as 150fps in some games at ULTRA settings, but FS2020 is still really in development and has yet to be optimised to take advantage of these new video cards. It will no doubt get better as time moves on and updates improve efficiency. Still, it looks like liquid silk with absolutely everything maxed to the hilt.

The temperature control of this particular card is pretty spectacular! It runs cooler than my 1080Ti - no matter what I throw at it. The only down side (apart from the eye-watering price) is the power consumption. There's no such thing as a 'green' game PC anymore 😂 

My only concern is that the Intel i7 9700k CPU will be the next bottleneck. And the fact that my Z390 ROG STRIX MotherBoard only has PCIE-3 slot for the GPU when it should really be a PCIE-4. It is, of course, backward compatible, but it means that I'm not squeezing every ounce out of the card.