The day before, sales of video cards NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 started. The first reviews did not show a significant increase in productivity in the younger novelty. And the authoritative YouTube blogger Roman Der8auer Hartung faced an unexpected problem that manifested itself on its copy of the GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition.
Image source: nvidia.com
When designing new generation video cards in their own Founds Edition, NVIDIA engineers made considerable efforts to make them more compact. In order to fit the novelties in two expansion slots, they had to be built on three boards instead of one large: one for the PCIe 5.0 X16 connector, the second for output of the signal through video ports, and the third – the main one with the GB202 graphic processor at RTX 5090 and GB203 in RTX 5080, and Also in memory of GDDR7 and power subsystem. In order not to interfere with cooling, they were connected with flat train.
The review author installed the GEFORCE RTX 5080 Founders Edition video card to the ASUS ROG Crosshair X870 Hero and AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor. Earlier on the same machine, he successfully tested the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080, RTX 4090 and even the senior RTX 5090. But the RTX 5080 first refused to show the signal. After repeatedly turning on and off the computer, removing and re -installation of the video card, the system finally “got started”. And behind the installation of all the drivers, the problem manifested itself again – there was a reboot, and the computer again did not see the graphic processor. As a result, when the Der8auer resorted to the method of trial and error several times, the video card earned, but at an amazingly low speed – in PCIe 1.1 x8 mode.
Then the author of the review forcibly set the PCIe 5.0 X16 configuration in the BIOS, and the RTX 5080 successfully earned in this mode, but attempts to launch the games Valorant, PUBG and REMNANT 2 led to departures and hanging. There can be several or even many hypothetical causes of such failures: problems with drivers, incorrect BIOS configuration, faulty components, etc. The problems suddenly ceased to appear when switching to PCIe 4.0. Given that other video cards on the same system worked normally, the problem probably still ended up on the side of this instance of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Fe or directly its design.