Galax provides a high performance RTX 3080 Ti solution with substantially improved cooling compared to the reference design, though the high price premium and lack of availability are still concerns.
The Galax GeForce RTX 3080 Ti SG — the SG is for “Serious Gamer,” if you’re wondering — looks to compete with the best graphics cards by offering a unique extra: a fourth clip-on fan to boost cooling performance. That’s double the fans of Nvidia’s reference GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition, if you’re keeping track. The 3080 Ti currently ranks as the second fastest GPU overall in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, just a couple percent behind the RTX 3090, and less than one percent ahead of AMD’s competing RX 6900 XT — though those results don’t include ray tracing, DLSS, or FSR performance comparisons. How does Galax fare against the competition, and more importantly, will you be able to find one in stock anywhere? The answer to the latter, unfortunately, is generally no, though readers over in Europe might have better luck.
Galax products are also sold under the KFA2 brand overseas, but other than slight differences in the box art, the cards are the same. The parent company for both brands is Palit, which by volume is one of the largest graphics card companies in the world. Despite the name, the Serious Gamer edition is basically equivalent to Nvidia’s reference model. Out of the box, it sports a boost clock of 1695MHz, just 30MHz higher than the Founders Edition. If you install Galax’s Xtreme Tuner Plus Software and use the 1-Click OC option, you’ll get a mostly meaningless bump to a 1710MHz boost clock — that’s less than a 1% difference. Still, we’ve used the factory overclock for testing, and we’ll use that for the specs table below.
