A well-known leaker with a good track record has published what the user claims to be the first image of Nvidia's upcoming GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition graphics card. The board (or rather its cooling system) seems brand-new, but since the devices are packaged into an antistatic bag, not many details can be seen.
Elysian Realm (@KittyYYuko) was relatively accurate with preliminary information about Nvidia's Ampere back in March 2020 (1, 2); now, the leaker is back with an alleged image of Nvidia's upcoming GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition board. Since the image comes from an unofficial source, albeit with a good track record, one should take it with a grain of salt. The photograph raises more questions than it provides answers.
The first thing that strikes the eye in the picture is that the board continues to use the design language of the GeForce RTX 30-series products (which are among the best gaming graphics cards today, so to speak). Yet, another thing that immediately attracts attention is the strange font used for the '4080' model number. It may not indicate that this is a fake image (and may imply that the board is authentic) as the font corresponds to the font Nvidia uses on its website, as noted by VideoCardz. Another oddity is that we do not see mounts of the bracket.
The card does not look like anything we have seen before. The board is dual-wide (like the RTX 3080), but it seems as tall and as long as the GeForce RTX 3090/3090 Ti. It also has a different fan with a refined blade design, which implies that this is a new board, not a GeForce RTX 30-series with a 4080 sticker. Meanwhile, the fan seems to be as big as the one on the GeForce RTX 3090 (which is logical) and is thicker than the one used by the dual-slot GeForce RTX 3080, which is why it sticks out more than it does on the RTX 3080.
From a previous leak covering Nvidia's upcoming GeForce RTX 40-series products, we know that the model RTX 4080 is supposed to be based on the AD103 graphics processing unit, which is not the biggest and the most power-hungry GPU in the lineup. Therefore, boards based on it do not require a substantial cooling system flagship boards like those powered by Nvidia's 'big ferocious' GA102 GPUs (aka BFGPUs). Meanwhile, AD103 is projected to be more power hungry than Nvidia's GA103/104 (which is used for GeForce RTX 3080 products); hence the usage of a 'taller' dual-wide heatsink seems to be justified.
In any case, while the card does not seem to be a Frankenstein created out of GeForce RTX 30-series Founders Edition parts, but is something new. Yet, we cannot state for sure that this is the upcoming GeForce RTX 4080 board.
