Nvidia Ampere 3 Series Cards - Feel in the hand comparisons.

[Archaea]

ASUS TUF O/C 3080 > EVGA X3 3089 in the look and feel dept.

The Asus feels heavy, beefy, high end. I'm really impressed with it. No plastic feel at all.
The EVGA X3 feels much smaller and more plastic by comparison. No backplate sorta leaves a bad taste in your mouth - just for cosmetics.

Asus packed the card with a nice thick black cardboard box with gold Asus logo, and big thick laser cut foam inside. The EVGA thin cardbox box protected a molded plastic shell. Both protect the card sufficiently, but the Asus packaging and presentation felt better too.
The Asus card is significantly larger than the X3. I had a EVGA 1080TI FTW in my case before. The EVGA X3 is significantly smaller than the 1080TI FTW, and the ASUS TUF OC is bigger - longer and taller.

The ASUS TUF OC has a bios switch on it to toggle between performance and silent. The EVGA X3 does not. Both have pretty lame RGB - just a single lighted area.

I have a completely open air case. It's the Thermaltake P3. The ASUS TUF O/C is effectively silent. In game, after 1.5 hours in CyberPunk with all settings maxed I cannot hear the Asus. Not at all unless I put my head right up to the card - inches away. All three fans just spin slow and cause no turbulence. My EVGA X3 typically has a low, non-obtrusive fan noise. I can hear it from my desk chair, but it is not a nuisance --- THAT IS until you play CyberPunk with Raytracing on Psycho. While the Asus Tuf stays silent - the EVGA X3 fans ramp up to be annoyingly loud without headphones.

See my video here:


No coil whine on either card.

Both the EVGA X3 3080 and the Asus Tuf 3080 overclock nicely. For crypto mining I can overclock both to +1467Mhz to get 101.5 - 102.5MHs with no failed submissions.

For some reason the Asus Tuf OC says in the excavator power use calculation that it uses 221 watts for this speed, while the EVGA X3 uses 245 watts.

The Asus Tuf OC is the better card in every way, except that the EVGA X3 is significantly smaller.

 

[exlink]

ASUS TUF O/C 3080 > EVGA X3 3089 in the look and feel dept.

The Asus feels heavy, beefy, high end. I'm really impressed with it. No plastic feel at all.
The EVGA X3 feels much smaller and more plastic by comparison. No backplate sorta leaves a bad taste in your mouth - just for cosmetics.

Asus packed the card with a nice thick black cardboard box with gold Asus logo, and big thick laser cut foam inside. The EVGA thin cardbox box protected a molded plastic shell. Both protect the card sufficiently, but the Asus packaging and presentation felt better too.
The Asus card is significantly larger than the X3. I had a EVGA 1080TI FTW in my case before. The EVGA X3 is significantly smaller than the 1080TI FTW, and the ASUS TUF OC is bigger - longer and taller.

The ASUS TUF OC has a bios switch on it to toggle between performance and silent. The EVGA X3 does not. Both have pretty lame RGB - just a single lighted area.

The EVGA X3 overclocks nicely. For crypto mining I can overclock the memory to +1467Mhz to get 102.6MHs. I haven't tried the Asus Tuf yet, but I'll update this post when I do.

Had both of these cards as well. The TUF is hands down made of better quality materials (my XC3 Ultra has a backplate though). The cooler also does a better job keeping the card cool and quiet.

But the TUF I had, just like many others, was plagued with very noticeable and annoying coil whine/buzz to the point that I had to return it. The ASUS 30 series cards seem to have the most issues with coil whine than any of the other AIBs. Search Google or YouTube for 30x0 coil whine and you’ll see they are almost all ASUS cards and some FEs.

My XC3 has next to no coil whine, I have put my ear up to the card when games are at 300 FPS+ to hear a very faint buzz. Below 200 FPS there is zero coil whine which is perfect since my monitor caps out at 144. The TUF had loud coil whine at all FPS/GPU loads, it was an absolute deal breaker. My XC3 also clocks a bit better but that is just silicon lottery.

Obviously ended up keeping the XC3 over the TUF as the cooler is irrelevant to me since I’ll be putting a waterblock on. Not to mention EVGA’s customer service is top tier and ASUS customer service is hit or miss.

 

[madpistol]

If you want the best "feeling" GPU in the hand, the RTX 3080 FE or 3090 FE are the winners. Both of these GPUs feel like solid metal bricks in hand.

 

[motqalden]

Can confirm the Asus Strix model would give twisted tea a run for its money.

 

[Archaea]

Just picked up a 3060TI FE reference card, and the packaging seemed like I was opening a diamond ring from a high end jewelry store. The card seemed robust and made of a chunk of aluminum. I like!

 

[Archaea]

I picked up the 3070 FE today - also from the Best Buy order, but delayed, and became ready for pickup today. I actually like the look and feel of the 3060TI FE better than the 3070 FE. Both very solid feel, so maybe I should say I just prefer the design of the 3060FE. It looks like it has a fuller coverage solid quality backplate and and a lighter aluminum color which to me looks better with the black. The 3070 FE has a backplate that doesn't look quite as nice IMO - with a more noticeable grill at the end of it for air flow through the card.

I actually didn't realize until now that each FE in the lineup gets a darker gunmetal color as you go up the performance stack.

3060TI vs. 3070 TI Color: (not my picture)

All four FE stacked: (not my picture)

both 3060ti FE and 3070 FE are quieter than EVGA x3 3080, but not as quiet as Asus Tuf OC 3080.

 

[euskalzabe]

I'm afraid you'll only feel this quality if you buy FE models. Regular cards are usually not this nicely built.

 

[polonyc2]

how does the FTW3 Ultra compare to the TUF?...I got my hands on the 3080 FTW3 this past week and looking into exchanging it for a TUF or Strix...

 

[Archaea]

Picked up an ASUS Strix 3070 in the last Best Buy round. It’s HUGE! It’s bigger than my ASUS TUF OC 3080, which is also HUGE.

It’s another quality offering. The size difference between it and the Nvidia FE 3070 is almost grotesque.

Feel in the hand in the Strix is A- It seems like there’s a little more plastic than I’d like, with fancy metal accents. The finish on it is soft and my finger nail scratched the plastic ever so slightly just trying to pull off the plastic protective sticker. The RGB light bar is walking rainbows by default and it won’t let me change it through armory crate with my mining motherboard and the PCI-E 1x slot — so I guess to turn off the lights I’ll have to hook it up to my gaming machine. Is walking rainbows really so popular an RGB choice that it should be default? I really dislike the carnival rainbow RGB stuff.

I had this same wayward RGB control issue with the EVGA X3 3080 (EVGA Precision X wouldn’t let me turn off the RGB from the mining motherboard riser). But when I put the cards in my gaming PC the RGB software works like it should. Both pieces of software would recognize their respective cards on the mining rig, but neither would allow changes.

In just 5 minutes I’ve already got the Strix mining more efficiently than any of my other cards that I’ve spent significantly more time tuning. (hours in some cases)
The Strix 3070 is already at 504 efficiency rating, (and its not even dialed in, and my second best is 484 on one of my 3060ti. The Strix has a TOTALLY different power target setting, than most of my cards I've used for mining, Pascal and Ampere I've used were typically 60% -75% power target for their most optimized efficiency. The Asus Strix 3070 is all the way down at 43%.

For the money comparison at play and cost difference I’d personally just buy the Asus Tuf and save $100-$150 over the Strix if the cards were side by side. I think they are pretty comparable as far as feel in the hand.

My Asus TUF OC 3080 is in my gaming rig. It's a great card. The other five cards are assigned to the mines.

Right to Left. (Pic 1)
Nvidia 3070 FE, Nvidia 3060ti FE, Nvidia 3060ti FE, Asus Strix 3070, EVGA X3 3080.

Asus Strix rough tune metrics (Pic 2)

 

[jobert]

How in the hell are you getting all these cards so easily when others cant even get a single high end card for months?

 

[Archaea]

How in the hell are you getting all these cards so easily when others cant even get a single high end card for months?

I've probably spent 120 hours+, no exaggeration, attempting to click discord notifications, signing up for wait lists, chasing distill i/o alerts. The cards didn't just fall into my lap, and I have no easy button secret. It's really like a job if you want to land a card. There are no tricks that I know of. I'm on call with my job so I always carry a phone. When my discord notifications go off on my phone I click the link. I'm a slave to the beep.

I have the five above in my mining rig, the ASUS Tuf 3080 in my gaming rig (that I mine with when not using it), and I bought one 3090 and sold to a friend unopened, who had been trying since launch to get one. I sold it at my exact cost (not one penny more).
I originally bought a 3070 closer to when they launched, but before I started mining. I sold it unopened because I regretted buying a 3070 when I knew I wanted a 3080.(but I had camped out at microcenter in the cold, so it was a revenge buy). I sold that one on facebook market place to a stranger with a $15 markup over what I paid for it to cover my gas and a hint of my time. At the time, this was before mining hit big profitability. I took flack on facebook for selling the 3070 for $600 (when I paid $585 on my receipt). Stupid. That card is worth $1200 now, and if I'd have kept it and mined with it, it would have already paid itself off, and still been worth stupid money on the used market.

So in total, I've purchased eight ampere cards, am mining on the six I currently own.
1 from Microcenter (camped)
1 from Adorama (signed up on launch day - shipped in early January)
1 from Amazon (signed up in December - shipped late January)
5 from BestBuy (purchased these cards over the last 3-4 drops that occur every 2 weeks -- frankly Best Buy is your best chance).

If mining wasn't a thing I'd only have bought one ampere card. Mining's profitable. That's why people do it, and why it's worth it financially spending time trying to get cards. You pay off your cards in 3-4 months, then make money (or bank crypto).

I debated selling this Asus Strix 3070 I got tonight from the last BestBuy drop because I see them selling on eBay for $1350 unopened, and I paid $765 -- but I decided to mine with it, because I'll probably come out ahead mining on the card, over the initial profit from the eBay sale. (with no chance of headache from a buyer situation).

If you aren't signed up for discord channels - that's the only real chance you have outside of Best Buy drops - I think I can say that after hitting probably many hundreds if not thousands of the discord stock notification links to be beaten by automated bots, or just the literally hundreds of thousands of other Discord notification users who are receiving the same in stock alert.
Here are the best discord channels I've found, join each for free. Setup your notifications on each. Join the fray of 99.5% disappointment when you race to the click, and it's gone by the time your webpage resolves. If you keep trying you'll land one. If the hunt's not worth it to you, then you'll have to wait till they are widely available, because the trouble is worth it for a great many folk. I started mining again in Jan, after a hiatus, and having sold off all my equipment in the last year or two. Since Jan I have mined .04BTC with these cards that are coming in 1-2 weeks apart over this last couple months.
At $50K per coin where BTC is currently priced, that .04 is a $2k cash out value. Cashing out pays for both of the 3060TI FE, the FE 3070, and the EVGA 3080 currently. Next month or two the Asus Tuf 3080OC and the Asus Strix 3070 should have paid themselves off as well. Profits are lowering by the day as more cards come online and the global hashrate increases - but as long as ETH stays priced high and BTC stays priced high - the lucrative mining boom will continue, and broader card availability will remain nill.
https://discord.gg/pnwmdNx5
https://discord.gg/stockdrops
https://discord.gg/W438Vz2
https://discord.gg/MtHFDAGd
https://discord.gg/EwxUKxeE

 

[AzixTGO]

backplate isn't just cosmetics for me. Its exposed PCB and potential cooling not exploited.