My Gigabyte AORUS RTX 3080 Xtreme Waterforce WB GFX Card Has Arrived

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This came in a very big box and when I took the card out the first thing I noticed was the weight of the thing, it’s very heavy. Build quality is high and everything appears to be quite refined and well protected.

The XSPC compression connectors I will be using with the water block will go underneath and above so one of the caps needs to be removed and installed below. They don’t provide you a tool for this so you will require a 6.0mm hex bit.

An important note about the weight of the card

By design the card is heavily reinforced by the water block and a metal backplate so it will not flex / sag which means the PCI-E slot will be under a lot of stress. PCI-E slots have been known to snap due to heavy high end gaming GFX cards which is why motherboard manufacturers started reinforcing the x16 slots with metal. To avoid such issues I will be looking to get some kind of additional support for the card. Next I will get this installed and post back with some testing results.