There's someone hawking an RTX 3080 for three hundred dollarydoos, and it's within a reasonable delivery range, so shipping's like 10% on top of that. Fuckin' steal. UGH.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. I just paid my electricity and water bills. I'm comfy, but not flush, and I don't wanna walk back our savings progress with even an absolute bargain like thissssss.
Waaaaaaaaaagh.
I'm on a 1070 Ti. On a 1440p monitor. And I have been for almost 4 years.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaagh.
Hmmm. Not satisfied enough with proof that the card is working. They're offering a screenshot of its specs, which is basically useless without other info, like, at least offer a photo of it in the motherboard, powered on, with a monitor in-shot showing GPUZ or something, so the mobo and card can both be confirmed. And if you're going that far, might as well take a quick video, y'know?
If they don't give satisfactory proof, I can at least put it to rest in my head - not risking 325 big ones for a paperweight.
HMMM. He's willing to take a video of the card working, with some paranoia-reducing extra requests on my part to prove it's recent/real video... hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm I might be out 325 toniiiiiiiiight....
Still waiting on the video, might have to check in tomorrow but he's not pressing me, and it's been up for almost a week already. I think his SEO is real bad. Searching for the card type doesn't produce this listing. There's lots of little red flags, but I'm addressing each one and it's looking good so far.
But I've also got some shit to do to make sure I can use this card!! I need to test my PSU cables to make sure I've got another two 8-pin connectors, because this fucking thing needs three, apparently? My poor (but decent quality) 650W PSU is barely gonna hold on, but, I'm going to undervolt it so it won't be an issue. Apparently you can drop an RTX 3080 almost a whole ~100W (so, 1/4 to 1/3 of its total real-world draw!) and lose no performance what-so-ever. Even runs cooler/quieter, too. What a strange card. Even without it, I believe 650W has been demonstrated to be enough for general gaming use, and I'm only running 1440p, which is basically a cakewalk for this card.
I'm likely to be pretty much CPU-bound now, only running a Ryzen 5600X at a smidge above stock. She's strapped to the biggest Noctua Chromax you can buy, however, so temperature will never be an issue for her! This model of 3080, the Gainward Phoenix, is a 3-fan card that is apparently quite loud, even for 3080s, and quite power-hungry, so an undervolt will help mitigate all of these problems at once, essentially, while saving me on power to boot!
I also need to run some current-system benchmarks! I always forget to do this! Having an idea of my current performance is critical to understanding whether or not exactly how absurdly good a deal I'm getting. I'll run the synthetics and get a bunch of FPS avgs from games I have installed, and run them again after the swap. :D
