[tosh]

Originally Posted by Ghost_Medley

My real question otherwise is if there's specific hardware that the 10 and 20 series is compatible with that the 30 series isn't? It wouldn't be too effective to buy the part to upgrade if it turns out it doesn't have the same compatibility.

Primary thing to watch out for would be that the 10 and 20 series cards use less power than the 30 series cards (at least the 3080, but it's reasonable to believe the other 30 series cards will be similar in that regard), so if for example you have a GTX 1080 with a 550w power supply, then it would be safer to upgrade your power supply if you're planning to upgrade to an RTX 3080.

Also, the RTX 3080 is pretty long (physically), so if you use a small case then you could run into an issue of it actually fitting into your system. But if you're using a mid-size ATX case then you should be fine. If concerned, most case manufacturers list the maximum allowable graphics card length in their spec sheet. Or you can also find that information on pcpartpicker.

I should mention that even though the 30 series cards are PCIe 4.0 compatible, they will work just fine on a motherboard that only has PCIe 3.0 compatibility.

In short, if someone is currently using a 10 or 20 series card without issue then there really shouldn't be anything that would cause a new 30 series card to not work. Though be warned if your CPU is like an AMD FX-8150 or something then it would be wiser to upgrade the CPU first as it would very likely bottleneck the currently announced 30 series lineup.