# NVIDIA GPU Showroom A gallery walk round the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition graphics card: what a GPU is, its cores, its flow\-through cooling, its connections and the RTX 3080 family, with a playful colour board By Numa Topic: Computing, AI & Electronics [Open the interactive Jig](https://ask.jig.com/j/ihjnx2kVA30k) ## Guide ### 1. GeForce RTX 3080 This is NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition, a graphics card\. Its job is to draw the pictures you see in games and creative apps, dozens of fresh pictures every second\. Founders Edition means NVIDIA designed and built this card itself\. Drag anywhere to walk round the card\. ### 2. The chip inside GPU stands for graphics processing unit\. Strictly, the GPU is one chip, called GA102, hidden inside this cooler; everything you see is the card built around it\. That chip holds 28\.3 billion transistors, tiny electric switches, on a slice of silicon about 2\.5 centimetres across\. ### 3. Thousands of tiny workers A computer's main processor, the CPU, has a few strong cores\. This GPU has 8,704 CUDA cores, small calculators that each work on a little piece of the picture at the same time\. It also has RT Cores, which trace rays of light for realistic shadows and reflections, and Tensor Cores for AI tricks such as DLSS, which sharpens smaller pictures into big ones\. ### 4. Two fans, two directions All that work makes heat: the card can use up to 320 watts, more than five old 60\-watt light bulbs\. A vapor chamber and heat pipes carry the heat into thin metal fins\. One fan pushes air out through the bracket, and the back\-side fan draws air straight through the card toward the top of the computer case\. ### 5. Plugging in The gold fingers along the edge slide into a PCIe x16 slot on the motherboard, the computer's main circuit board\. Power arrives through a small 12\-pin plug\. Finished pictures leave through the metal bracket: one HDMI port and three DisplayPorts, up to 8K, which is 7680 by 4320 pixels\. ### 6. One body, three cards NVIDIA lists three cards in this family, all in the same 285 by 112 millimetre, two\-slot body\. They differ in how many CUDA cores they use, how much GDDR6X memory they carry, and how much power they draw\. Memory, or VRAM, keeps picture data close to the chip; the boost clock counts its working beats, about 1\.7 billion every second\. ### 7. Paint it your way The real Founders Edition comes in one finish: black covers on a silver frame\. The other chips are just for fun\. Tap a chip to repaint the black covers in NVIDIA green, snow white or sunset orange\.