Best CPUs for NVIDIA RTX 3080
Ampere's high-water mark, and now firmly a used-market card. It still delivers the frame rate people bought it for at 1440p, which is why it keeps showing up in build advice years later. The reservation is memory: ten gigabytes was tight when it launched and it is tighter now, so texture settings are where you will feel its age first, not raw speed.
Ranked below: 15 CPUs against the NVIDIA RTX 3080 at 1440p, balanced pairings first, then by bottleneck %.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best CPU for the NVIDIA RTX 3080?
The Intel Core i7-13700 is the best CPU for the NVIDIA RTX 3080 with only a 10% bottleneck at 1440p. It has a gaming score of 86/100.
What is the cheapest CPU that won't bottleneck the NVIDIA RTX 3080?
The Intel Core i7-13700 is well-balanced with the NVIDIA RTX 3080, at only 10% bottleneck at 1440p.
Is a used RTX 3080 a good buy?
It is one of the better value cards on the secondhand market, with the usual caveats about buying used silicon that may have spent its life mining. Ask about that. The thing to weigh against it is VRAM, since newer cards a tier below it on paper sometimes hold up better in memory-hungry titles purely because they have more of it.
Test any CPU/GPU pair with our free bottleneck calculator.