AggieKO said:
Thanks for the detailed reply! I don't really know a whole lot about CPUs since my computer now is a prebuilt. Was kind of wanting to build one now in fear that 3080s are going to be hard to come by.
Which brings me to my next question. Is it work spending more for the an "after market" 3080 like the Aorus xtreme or better to go with the founders edition?
No problem!
It depends on the model, but there are usually some AIB partner cards (AKA aftermarket, like ones from Aorus/Gigabyte, Asus, EVGA, MSI, etc) that are at a similar price point or even cheaper than the Founder's Edition cards from NVIDIA. Based on past history, even the cheaper, decent ones perform on par or even better than the Founder's Edition while being quieter due to better cooler designs. NVIDIA radically changed their cooler design this time around though and we don't how well that will work compared to the more traditional designs that have already been shown off by the AIB partners.
Some of the more expensive models can have a higher performance ceiling, usually due to better cooling and better power delivery that allows that allows the GPU and memory to hit faster speeds for longer periods of time. For most people, the increasingly expensive models typically aren't worth it for the fairly small gains unless you're a competitive overclocker, someone who plans on watercooling that can better take advantage of more power, or someone who wants the absolute best with the cash to spend.
Personally, I'll probably be going with an EVGA FTW3 model and putting a waterblock on it. I had the same for my 1080 Ti and 2080 Ti, both of which I also watercooled and they were great cards. Massive overkill for most, but that watercooling and overclocking/tinkering is part of the fun for me.
Another note on the AMD versus Intel thing. I mentioned that Intel doesn't currently support PCIe gen 4 (though the rumors are their next CPUs will sometime next year), whereas the current Ryzen 3000 CPUs already do (when in a 500 series motherboard) and the Ryzen 4000 series coming out later this Fall definitely will as well. The reason I mention this is that these new NVIDIA GPUs are also PCIe gen 4 and might actually exceed the bandwidth capabilities of PCIe gen 3 connections, especially with some of the direct storage access techniques NVIDIA mentioned in their briefing. That kind of GPU direct storage access is one of the benefits of the newer consoles that some devs (like Epic Games, which makes the Unreal Engine used by many other devs among other things) have been hyping up as well. The PCIe gen 3 limitations haven't been an issue for GPUs prior to this launch.