COLORFUL iGame GeForce RTX 5080 Advanced OC-V Review – Good Card, Bad GPU

Update @ 4 Feb 2025, 6:41PM – we identified a small mistake on the RGB lighting behavior, which has been amended. Original article follows.

NVIDIA’s second GPU under the RTX 50 series, the RTX 5080, is now here – while yesterday’s reveal is for the MSRP and Founders Edition cards, today we’ll be focusing on AIB variants. Specifically, COLORFUL sent us its new iGame Advanced OC-V variant of the RTX 5080 GPU, which we’ll take a look in this review.

Unboxing

The packaging of this RTX 5080 GPU is admittedly quite huge, and that’s for a reason. For one, the card itself is huge – as large as most RTX 4090 cards out there, and you also get the parts which can be assembled into a GPU support stand, and you’ll definitely need it given just how chonky this card is.

Besides the parts for the GPU stand, you also get a Phillips screwdriver along with the RGB sync cable, while the 12V-2×6 to 3x 8-pin PCIe power connector is pretty much the same as you’ll find in existing RTX 40 GPUs (only the RTX 50 Founders Edition cards get the paracord cables, which is significantly more flexible compared to conventional braided cables).

Walkaround

At 355 x 144.7 x 68.8mm, the COLORFUL iGame GeForce RTX 5080 Advanced OC-V is one huge card that rivals the size of RTX 4090 produced by AIB partners. For reference, it is just millimeters smaller than the ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4090 card (357.6 x 149.3 x 70.1mm), though there is a legitimate reason for making cards bigger.

As for the card itself, it uses triple counter-rotating fan configuration with flow-through exhaust on the far side, a common configuration in high-end AIB cards; if you look closely, most of the visible parts of the GPU uses the translucent shroud, including the fans themselves, aesthetically, it looks good, RGB enabled or otherwise (COLORFUL also mimicked NVIDIA FE cards’ hourglass design at the front of the shroud).

So, now that we know this card has similar footprint as the RTX 4090 cards, but why? It comes down to the density of heatsink fins. As you can see, the heatsinks are very loosely packed, and that’s for a reason: noise. Such configuration requires less static pressure from the fans, which means the fans don’t have to spin as fast, and thus makes less noise overall.

The 12V-2×6 power connector is located slightly on the right from the center of the card, and not only you’ll find the 600W-capable power connector here, there’s also an 8-pin RGB sync header which you must connect using the included cable in order to enable ARGB functionality. If unplugged, the GPU will only light up in a single color cycle (which we’ll show below).

For I/O, you get a trio of new DisplayPort 2.1 ports which supports high-refresh 8K and multi-monitor 4K resolutions, along with the HDMI 2.1 port inherited from RTX 40 cards with the same capabilities. Next to them is COLORFUL’s signature button that activates “Turbo” mode when enabled, which gives the GPU an extra boost in performance (it is not a dual BIOS switch, however).

The card has two lighting zones: the main one is the center fan, and you’ll need the RGB sync cable to customize it; the other zone is located on the far side of the card with the same translucent effects, though it’s not quite as bright compared to the fan itself.

Specifications

COLORFUL iGame GeForce RTX 5080 Advanced OC 16GB-V

Full specifications available on product page.

GPU Core & VRAM: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080
GPU Core Variant	GB203-400-A1
Microarchitecture	Blackwell
Process Node	TSMC 4NP (enhanced 5nm-class)
Transistors	45.6 billion
Die size	378mm²
Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs)	84
CUDA Cores	10752
Tensor Cores	336
RT Cores	84
Cache	64MB L2
VRAM Configuration	16GB GDDR7 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	30Gbps, 960GB/s peak
Add-in board: COLORFUL iGame GeForce RTX 5080 Advanced OC-V
Fan Layout	Triple counter-rotating axial fans (single flow-through)
Base/Boost Clocks	2295 / 2617MHz 2670MHz (Turbo mode)
TDP (TGP)	390W
Factory Recommended PSU	850W
Dual BIOS Mode	No
Display Outputs	3x DisplayPort 2.1b 1x HDMI 2.1b *Max output resolution: 7680×4320 (8K)
Power Connector	1x 12V-2×6 (12VHPWR) connector
Bus Interface	PCIe 5.0 x16
Dimensions	3.5-slot, 355 x 144.7 x 68.8 mm

Test System

CPU	Intel Core i9-13900K (8P+16E, 32 threads)
Cooling	Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL360 Flux 30th Anniversary Edition Polartherm X-10
Motherboard	ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Apex
GPU	> COLORFUL iGame GeForce RTX 5080 Advanced OC-V
Memory	Kingston FURY BEAST RGB DDR5-6800 CL34 (2x16GB) *configured to DDR5-6400 CL32 XMP profile
Storage	ADATA LEGEND 960 MAX 1TB
Power Supply	GameMax Rampage GX-1050 PRO (ATX 3.1) 1050W
Case	VECTOR Bench Case (Open-air chassis)
Operating System	Windows 11 Home 24H2

Performance

All benchmarks are done in out-of-the-box settings under Turbo Mode – for gaming benchmarks, upscaling and frame generation features such as NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, or Intel XeSS are turned off unless otherwise specified in the chart.

Synthetic Benchmarks

Starting with synthetic benchmarks, and things are not looking that good right out of the gate. For 12% more power draw, you end up also getting around 15-20% performance improvement in most of the tests when compared to the RTX 4080 Super (the ASUS ProArt variant we used here is not factory-overclocked). The improvements made in power efficiency is straight up lackluster, and it really looks like NVIDIA is betting everything on AI while the power efficiency on the microarchitectural level is now merely an afterthought.

Note: we have confirmed with NVIDIA that Cinebench 2024 will not work with all Blackwell GPUs, and said Maxon (the developer) will move to Redshift benchmark with compatibility available for Blackwell in February.

Gaming Benchmarks

Gaming benchmarks have also proved that Blackwell is mostly a dud – there’s a reason why NVIDIA is trying to convince everyone that Blackwell cards are “2x faster” than RTX 40 counterparts, while making a small footnote that all of them have to rely on the Multi Frame Gen feature that, in practice, makes the FPS number go up with little to no improvement in responsiveness. In extreme cases like RDR2 and Hitman 3, the gen-on-gen improvement is lower than 10% even on 4K – which is awfully small by GPU standards.

Thermals

Here comes the quality assessment on COLORFUL’s part: cooling performance. On that end, job well done by the Chinese AIB maker, as both the core temperature and VRAM temperature stayed well below 70°C throughout the 10-minute Furmark stress test, with very little noise as the card can be cooled easily with low static pressure airflow.

Another thing worth noting is that NVIDIA has deprecated the hotspot thermal sensor, which now reports 255°C by default (and that’s impossible); the card also stopped reporting its maximum safe temperature through HWiNFO64 software that we use, though NVIDIA did list the max temperatures in its official spec sheet, which we’ve superimposed on the charts above.

Surprisingly, activating the Turbo mode actually allows the card to increase its TDP to 370W, which is 10 watts more than the GPU’s default 360W TDP. That said, COLORFUL officially lists the card’s TDP as 390W, but it’s not clear if it may be a typo on its part. Under this mode, the fans are more aggressive – but that ended up lowering temperatures even further with sub-60°C core temp in both tests and lower VRAM thermals as well. Fan noise are, like before, hardly noticeable even in open-air conditions.

Software

The software responsible for the GPU tuning is the COLORFUL iGame Center app, which is available in two versions: standard and lite. In our case, we downloaded the full version, and once installation is done you’ll be greeted with this homepage (as below). I’m not sure why there has to be a meter measuring the “AI computing power” though.

If you can’t read Chinese, this may be a problem to you – some elements throughout the app is either poorly translated, or simply not translated at all. In any case, you can control the RGB settings (if the header is connected), overclocking, and fan controls in this app. I wouldn’t say this is the most intuitive app to use, and that’s despite me understanding what it says.

Verdict

To round up this review, we’ll have to look from two perspectives: the card itself, and the GPU (or the Blackwell architecture in general). COLORFUL’s design is a solid one – if your case comes with ample space to install large GPUs, this card delivers all the benefits associated with it making it a good trade-off between noise plus thermals against physical footprint. I do wish that the RGB cables wouldn’t have to be necessary, since other cards can already support customizable lighting without the need of a specialized cable.

At this time, the pricing for the COLORFUL iGame GeForce RTX 5080 Advanced OC-V is yet to be announced, but we can assume it’s more than the $1,000 MSRP (RM5,190 local MSRP) baseline that NVIDIA is asking for its Founders Edition cards. Still, regardless of the upcharge imposed for this particular AIB variant, the performance of the GPU itself is so underwhelming that it simply wouldn’t convince anyone to upgrade, unless the stocks of RTX 4080 Supers run out today.

Ignoring the AIB part, what exactly is NVIDIA selling for the price it’s asking for? The answer is most likely, and unsurprisingly, AI. The only new gaming-related feature it’s getting that doesn’t share with older cards is Multi Frame Generation (MFG), which essentially cranks the dial up from 2x to 4x frames and promising less visual artifacts; other than that NVIDIA also claims better AI performance through the use of FP4 over FP8, all while increasing the TDP of these cards that provide very little perf-per-watt improvements.

With modern games getting increasingly difficult to run without resorting to AI-powered upscaling measures, those who prefer native resolution or minimal upscaling will not see much benefit in the Blackwell lineup. The bigger deal seems to be all the other software features that NVIDIA announced during CES earlier this month (like Reflex 2 and new Transformer upscaling model), and honestly, you’re better off just wait for a year or two if you aren’t in a hurry to upgrade – the older cards will still get some of these AI features after all.

Special thanks to COLORFUL for providing the COLORFUL iGame GeForce RTX 5080 Advanced OC-V GPU for this review.