A new snap, purportedly of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, has surfaced on Reddit, giving us a little more insight into what Nvidia's next-generation graphics card might look like

The new photo is by someone named LeeJiangLee, a name that has nothing to do with the previous leaked information However, if it is indeed a photo of the GeForce RTX 3080, it shows that there will be a great deal of cooling on the graphics card

The new photo shows the graphics card without the shroud attached, showing what is going on under the dual-fan design and sitting alongside the large exposed heat sink It also appears to have lots of heat pipes to draw heat away from the GPU

Despite this gut-and-all style photo, there is still not much to be gleaned about the GeForce RTX 3080 However, we can assume that the large heatsink, and the fins and fans seen in the previous photo, are necessary to contain the RTX 3080's GPU power

In general, the more powerful a graphics card is, the more power it requires And more power flowing through the graphics card's transistors means more heat, which, if left unchecked, can damage the silicon on which the GPU is built

Adequate cooling can prevent powerful graphics cards from being damaged, but serious cooling is required to allow the card to operate at full power for extended periods of time Inefficient cooling causes "throttling" of the graphics card, which slows down the GPU This is not what we want when the next generation of graphically demanding games, coming soon on the PS5 and Xbox Series X, arrive later this year

Sadly, this could make the GeForce RTX 3080 a design that doesn't necessarily appeal to our technical tastes However, we understand that some people don't care about the aesthetics of a gaming PC's internals and instead want the most power possible If so, the GeForce RTX 3080 may be the card for you That is, of course, if AMD doesn't have a Radeon counterpart