Soldato
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I own a Gigabyte 2080S Water Force WB. It's a nice card and I'm pretty happy with it. (Well, my son is pretty happy with it since he uses that rig most of the time.) Before buying a card with a pre-installed water block, consider that: 1.) You'll need to plumb in the card before you can test it under load - if you're unfortunate enough to get a DOA board or otherwise need to RMA, it's a pain versus plugging it in air cooled for testing; 2.) When it comes time to sell the card, you'll have a limited pool of potential buyers; 3.) If YOU ever want to air cool it (e.g. you move it to a secondary rig after upgrading to an RTX4080ti or whatever), you'll need to source an after-market air cooler.
The RTX3080-10g-EK looks a great card and I'm not discouraging anyone from buying it. I just hadn't considered the points above when I bought the 2080S WF-WB until I opened the box and realised I would have to plumb it in before I even knew it was a working card. Personally, I think I'll always buy GPUs with stock air coolers and a full cover water block upgrade going forward. This time around I've gone with the RX 6800 MBA with the EK Radeon branded WB.... Just trying to score a Dark Hero and 5900x before I build the new rig with custom loop.
The RTX3080-10g-EK looks a great card and I'm not discouraging anyone from buying it. I just hadn't considered the points above when I bought the 2080S WF-WB until I opened the box and realised I would have to plumb it in before I even knew it was a working card. Personally, I think I'll always buy GPUs with stock air coolers and a full cover water block upgrade going forward. This time around I've gone with the RX 6800 MBA with the EK Radeon branded WB.... Just trying to score a Dark Hero and 5900x before I build the new rig with custom loop.
Associate
Challenging situation @Gibbo, can you give a view on when you are likely to make these available?
Is it too long now until you've got a genuine queue system in place to prevent this?
Associate
Or employ a similar system as another online retailer who sells the stock they have with a 15 minute ‘in-basket’ window?
Appreciate you’ve broken up for Xmas ... it’s been a busy quarter, hope you manage some proper downtime.
when you get back - would be nice to consider offering these cards to those people who have been, and still are, queuing from day 1... which is 3 months ago.
I’d love to swap from my 3080 Strix OC across to a 3080EKWB.
this would please those who want to swap. And free up cards for those further down the queue. Without opening up the website to obscene traffic. And protecting to an extent against scalpers.
in the meantime ... for those looking at these cards - they did a piece on the ASUS DIY Facebook channel on them. Worth a look. I hadn’t realised before this that they are clocked at FE and not Strix levels. But I’m after a cool rather than overclocked build anyway....
https://www.facebook.com/juanjose.guerreroiii.3/videos/3065276176906823/
Associate
yep these are FE level performance rather than TUF or strix. I’d be happy with that though as they are plenty fast enough for my needs at ultra wide resolutions.
For me the choice is either an FE which I’ll put a block on or one of these pre-blocked for around the same money. I struggle to justify Paying 200+ over this for an AIB card at rrp which then also needs a block.
If you see my post in sticky thread, I have just announced a similar idea for 3070's as we have being stock piling 3070 GPU to make such things happen.
Unfortunately on 3080 GPU we have practically nothing stock piled, so far we have two of these cards which are still waiting to be booked in, at which point they will probably be taken by SI for R&D.
I saw the 3070 post. Nice touch. And I appreciate the situation with the 3080s, although I hadn’t realised they’d only sent you two EKWB cards! Ouch. Did you forget their birthday or something!
