We’ve seen graphics cards take all sorts of shapes and sizes over the years, but none of those designs has been as—in-your-face, shall we say?—as Colorful’s $879.99 iGame GeForce RTX 3080 Vulcan OC 10G-V. Sporting a fully customizable LCD panel strapped right to the edge of the card, the RTX 3080 Vulcan OC 10G-V pumps out a whole lot of power, on par with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition and other third-party RTX 3080s we’ve tested so far. And it looks wholly its own while doing it. Its three-slot-wide, 12.7-inch-long beastliness will make builders of compact PCs flee in terror, and the OC button on the back doesn’t yield the level of oomph we were hoping for, but there’s still no other card out there quite like it. Its availability through mainstream channels in the US market is still pending, but anyone who can find this card on international markets or via specialized retailers will gain a whole new way to customize their PC—not to mention, get a killer GPU inside.
A Screen for Memes and More
Like other third-party GeForce RTX 3080 cards we’ve tested, the Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3080 Vulcan OC 10G-V is not a small card. In fact, it’s the biggest we’ve seen to date, even surpassing the massive 12.3-inch-long MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio. Its three-slot width and 12.7-inch length mean the Vulcan OC 10G-V will fit only in the largest of case options. Compact PC builders would be better off opting for smaller cards in the 30 Series stack, like the comparatively petite (9.5-inch) Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition.
Pulling it out of the box, on first glance you’d be forgiven for thinking Colorful’s card looks like many other third-party cards out there, with its tri-fan cooling system and angled shroud mimicking the aesthetic of hundreds of power cards that have come before it. But this GPU holds a special surprise on the side of the card (or the top, depending on its orientation in your desktop): a fully customizable 480-by-129 pixel LCD screen.
This isn’t the first time that a screen has been attached to a GPU, though. In fact, this is the third iteration of Colorful’s GPU-mounted LCD system, here appropriately dubbed “LCD3.0.”
This display can be customized however you like using Colorful’s iGame software, including by uploading custom images (as you can see above), or choosing from dozens of different animations and patterns bundled with the iGame software suite. Custom text is also an option…
You can also use it strictly to display an array of system statistics such as GPU temperature and CPU usage, with about a dozen other options, too. You can even split the display into two zones, so one side is your GPU info and the other is CPU info.
Of course, we couldn’t resist putting the PCMag logo on it, but you can upload any JPEG file that you create yourself or download for the internet on that screen, which gives PC customizers a whole new paintbrush to take for a spin on familiar canvas.
The card also comes out of the box with a vertical-mounting toolkit, if that’s your preferred method of installation in your PC case. (Note: It doesn’t include the crucial PCI Express riser cable, however; you’ll have to supply that yourself.) By including a near-full toolkit as a part of the Vulcan OC 10G-V’s package, Colorful has made it easier for custom PC builders out there to show off their new RTX 3080 (along with its shiny LCD screen) in creative ways. The screen can flip to either sit flush with the card, or stick outward at a 90-degree angle, if you choose to go the vertical-mounting route.
Outside of the innovation of the onboard LCD panel, though, the rest of the heatsink design of the RTX 3080 Vulcan OC 10G-V is typical of the rest of the market. It employs three fans mounted on an aluminum heatsink, screwed into an aluminum backplate that runs the length of the PCB.
One potential hangup for upgraders could be the Vulcan OC 10G-V’s power needs. Like the MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio 10G, the iGame Vulcan OC needs three separate eight-pin power connectors to boot up. So make sure your power supply can support this requirement before you take the plunge. This gives the card an increased power ceiling over the Founders Edition (370 watts vs. 320 watts in the FE), which should, in theory, contribute to better benchmark results while the card is tuned to the overclock profile.
The Vulcan 10G doesn’t break from the pack on port layout, mirroring what we’ve seen on the rest of the 30 Series so far with three DisplayPort 1.4b ports, and one HDMI 2.1 output (VirtualLink hopefuls, keep hoping). One unusual addition here, though, is the inclusion of what Colorful calls its “Turbo Boost” button, which can be toggled on and off to switch between either an overclocked or non-overclocked profile. More on that in a bit.
The Specs: Mr. Sulu, Engage the Overclock
First, let’s dive into a quick breakdown of the specs of the RTX 3080 Vulcan OC 10G, and specifically how it compares to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition, as well as AMD’s competition in the RX 6800 XT.
At $879, the iGame GeForce RTX 3080 Vulcan OC 10G demands a premium for the privilege of tacking that small screen onto your card. It’s the most expensive third-party overclocked model we’ve tested yet, and is just over 25% more expensive than Nvidia’s $699 RTX 3080 Founders Edition (if ever you can find that card in stock, that is).
Now about that overclock button. In most graphics cards that support some kind of overclocked profile, this usually takes the form of a small switch somewhere on the side of the card itself. Colorful has said “Nuts!” to that subtle approach, tacking a big button right on the card backplane, next to the ports. The button harkens back to an old-school “turbo” button that we used to see on desktop PCs back in the 1990s and early aughts.
Press the button, and your card gets a virtual NOx injection of 90MHz to the peak boost clock, bringing it from 1,710MHz up to an even 1,800MHz. This is one of the only changes in core specifications from the RTX 3080 Founders Edition to Colorful’s version in the Vulcan OC 10G-V (along with a jump in board power), and we’ll discuss the impact of that performance enhancer once we get into the benchmarks below.
Testing the Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3080 Vulcan OC 10G-V
PC Labs ran the Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3080 Vulcan OC 10G-V through a series of DirectX 11- and 12-based synthetic and real-world benchmarks. Our 2020 PC Labs test rig is Intel-based and employs a PCI Express 3.0, not 4.0, motherboard. It’s equipped with an Intel Core i9-10900K processor, 16GB of G.Skill DDR4 memory, a solid-state boot drive, and an Asus ROG Maximus XII Hero (Wi-Fi) motherboard. All cards below were retested on this rig with their latest drivers for an even playing field. Given our tests with the Core i9-10900K and recent Ryzen 9 CPUs, this rig is the best reasonable configuration of the moment in 2020 to cut the CPU out of the equation for frame rates. (Read more about how we test graphics cards.)
For our testing, we focused some of the effort on the esports aspect of the RTX 3080 Vulcan OC 10G-V with games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) and Rainbow Six: Siege. We also ran the card through the rest of our standard benchmark regimen, which tests a card’s abilities to handle AAA games at the highest possible quality settings, as well as how it rides during synthetic benchmarks that stress the card in a variety of ways.
Also remember that almost every test we run (aside from the esports titles) is done at the highest possible quality preset or settings. If you have a higher-hertz gaming monitor and you’re worried your card might not make the frame-rate grade, it could still be possible with the right card and a combination of lower settings. Not only that, but many of these titles (including Death Stranding, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and F1 2020) have both DLSS and FidelityFX CAS with Upscaling integrated directly into the game. This can mean boosts of up to 40% more performance on top, depending on the setting and the card you’re playing with.
And so, onward to our test results. Note: If you want to narrow down our results below to a specific resolution (say, the resolution of the monitor you plan to game on), click the other resolution dots in the chart legends below to suppress them and see fewer results. For our suite of testing on third-party cards, we’ve trimmed down our list of benchmarked titles by a few games. This more streamlined set of options covers enough titles to tell the story of how these cards perform in most gaming scenarios, but if you’d like a full list of all the games we’ve tested on the RTX 3080 Founders Edition exclusively, head on over to that review to get the rest of the goods.
Testing Results: Synthetic Benchmarks
Synthetic benchmarks can be good predictors of real-world gaming performance. UL’s Fire Strike Ultra is still a go-to as an approximation of the load levied by mainstream 4K gaming. We’re looking only at the test’s Graphics Subscore, not the Overall Score, to isolate the card performance. Meanwhile, we also ran 3DMark’s Time Spy Extreme test, which is a good test of how well a card will do specifically in DirectX 12 games at 4K resolution. Finally, there’s Port Royal, which is strictly a test for RTX cards right now, measuring how well they handle ray-tracing tasks. Also here are a handful of GPU-acceleration tests (Furmark and LuxMark); more details on those at the “how we test” link above.
If there’s one emerging truth we’re starting to glean as we review more third-party RTX 30 Series cards, it’s that this GPU is stable. Across all the synthetic runs, the iGame GeForce RTX 3080 Vulcan OC 10G-V runs tightly within the expectations set by other cards of similar power and size in the RTX 3080 lineup. That said, it doesn’t seem to mount any sort of real offensive against the original RTX 3080 Founders Edition congruent with the higher price.
Testing Results: Recent AAA Games and Multiplayer Titles
Now on to real-world games. We typically used in each case (for these AAA games) the highest in-game preset and, if available, DirectX 12. The multiplayer-focused and esports titles (CS:GO and Rainbow Six) were set slightly below top detail settings to maximize frame rates.
A similar story leapt off the page once we’d punched in the numbers for all our game tests. The card is a spectacle in performance, don’t get us wrong. However, it struggles to pull itself reasonably far enough away from the RTX 3080 Founders Edition in AAA titles.
That changed a bit though once we got into multiplayer testing, where the iGame GeForce RTX 3080 Vulcan OC 10G-V edged out all comers and set a new top frame-rate record in our benchmark run of Rainbow Six: Siege. The card also took a win in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in 1440p, but with all that in mind: If you’re spending $879 on a GPU for games like these, you’d better have a 4K 144Hz display like the Acer Predator XB3, or you’re just burning money.
Testing Results: Legacy Games
We also ran some quick tests on some oldies-but-goodies that still offer the AAA gaming experience. These legacy tests include runs of Hitman: Absolution, Tomb Raider (2013), and Bioshock: Infinite, the latter being a game that has no business still being as well optimized as it is here in 2020.
More on-the-nose numbers. The iGame GeForce RTX 3080 Vulcan OC 10G-V continued its “reign of same” by again posting numbers right within the margins for our expectations, and dishing out some hurt on these titles to the new $649 AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT. Until AMD gets a new driver set sorted out, these games will be a tough road for its RX 6800 cards.
Overclocking and Thermals: But This One Goes to 11
We ran a 10-minute stress test in 3DMark Port Royal on the Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3080 Vulcan OC 10G-V, and found the card sat right within the the thermal expectations set by the rest of the RTX 3080 models we’ve tested so far, at a peak of 78 degrees C (recorded near the end of the run).
In our FLIR One Pro thermal-camera heatmap testing, the RTX 3080 Vulcan OC 10G-V mirrored the same story we’ve seen in most third-party cards, with most waste heat collecting on the backplate, and what’s left being jettisoned out the back. Also from what we can tell, it doesn’t look like the LCD panel is producing much extra heat, so no worries there.
With heat testing out of the way, it was time to light this candle and really let the Colorful card shine where it was meant to most: overclocking. We started things off the easy way by pressing the Turbo Boost button on the back of the card, which automatically jumped our boost clock potential by 90MHz.
From that one move, we saw increases of about 3% in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Rainbow Six: Siege…hardly the results we were hoping for from such a dramatic action. (The button has a very satisfying click mechanism, which also activates a blue-hued ring light on the back the card.)
So then it was time to get our hands dirty with the EVGA Precision X1 overclocking software, which is where things really started to kick off. Through careful tuning (and a lot of trial and error), I was able to achieve a stable boost clock profile of 2,115MHz, and 250MHz on the memory. This tune, representing a 23% jump in boost clock, returned higher numbers than the stock OC profile activated by the Turbo Boost button. Using this profile, I was able to achieve a stable and reliable overclock that produced results of 8% and 12% higher frame rates in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Rainbow Six: Siege, respectively.
Verdict: Step Up Your Customization Game
Colorful’s iGame GeForce RTX 3080 Vulcan OC 10G-V is a powerful, if slightly frivolous (depending on who you ask), addition to the swelling canon of third-party RTX 3080 cards. In our testing, we saw the card perform at or above expectations in more than a few benchmarks, and its overclocking profile was substantial enough for the card to earn the “OC” part of its badge.
However, on performance alone, the card doesn’t do quite enough to justify the 25% price difference between itself and the RTX 3080 Founders Edition. We understand that slapping a custom, movable display on a graphics card isn’t cheap, but anyone who’s looking for a sheer performance option (as opposed to a performance option that’s also a customizer’s dream card) might want to consider cheaper alternatives like the Asus TUF Gaming RTX 3080 OC instead.
Ultimately, though, if you’ve been having a hard time finding other versions of the RTX 3080, you’re really going to have a hard time finding the Colorful card. According to representatives at Colorful, mainstream U.S. etailer channels would not yet have the card as of early December 2020, though you might be able to find it from specialized sites that import overseas hardware.
That said, if it ever does make it stateside in a wide way, the card’s unique approach to system customization and its strong performance results will make it a must-have for hardcore PC builders and designers seeking that little “extra something.” Ever wanted your very own branded graphics card? Colorful makes it a reality.
