As a follow up to last week's all-in-one liquid cooling based product, GIGABYTE today released the Aorus Xtreme GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 WaterForceWB. These cards are targeted at enthusiasts with DIY liquid cooling setups, and come with a factory-fitted full-coverage water block, instead of the AIO cooler. The block's primary material is nickel-plated copper with mirror finish, while its top is mainly acrylic, with opaque embellishments, a part of which is an addressable RGB LED diffuser that takes input from a standarized aRGB header. The opaque portion of the top also features a glowing Aorus logo.

The underlying PCB of the RTX 2080 Ti WaterForce WB packs a 16+3 phase VRM that draws power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors, 1770 MHz GPU Boost frequency, and a memory overclock of 14140 MHz (vs. 14000 MHz). The RTX 2080 WaterForce WB features the same PCB as its AIO-equipped twin, with a 12+2 phase VRM, 1890 MHz GPU Boost, and 14140 MHz memory OC. While the block itself is around 1-slot thick, a second row of display connectors makes the card 2-slot. Among these connectors are three each of DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0b, and VirtualLink.

Gigabyte is now readying a new hybrid cooled graphics card, based on NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080. Dubbed the Aorus Xtreme WaterForce (GV-N2080AORUSX W-8GC). It uses an all-in-one liquid cooler based design that makes use of a 240 mm radiator. The copper baseplate is quite large and receives heat from the cards VRM via a copper heat pipe, thus cooling all major components. The fans are of course RGB LED-equipped, which goes with the illuminated translucent wing on the shroud. Overall it is an attractive card if you have the extra space for its cooling solution.

This model isn't just a standard offering with a fancy cooler, Gigabyte has equipped it with a sizable overclock, pushing the card to 1890 MHz the same core clocks as the Aorus Xtreme air and the waterblock equipped WaterForce WB. Memory speeds see a speed bump as well of 140 MHz which pushes the overall memory clock speed up to 14140 MHz. The board design is also based on the Aorus Xtreme and Aorus Xtreme Waterforce WB cards and comes with a 12+2 phase design and dual 8-pin power connectors. Display connectivity is also the same as the other models and includes; 3x DisplayPort, 3x HDMI, and a single USB TypeC.

Thanks to some photographs by Andreas Schilling, of HardwareLuxx, it is now confirmed that AMD's Radeon RX 590 will make use of the 12 nm FinFET process. The change from 14 nm to 12 nm FinFET for the RX 590 brings with it the possibility of both higher clock speeds and better power efficiency. That said, considering it is based on the same Polaris architecture used in the Radeon RX 580 and 570, it remains to be seen how it will impact AMDs pricing in regards to the product stack. Will there be a price drop to compensate, or will the RX 590 be more expensive? Since AMD has already made things confusing enough with its cut down 2048SP version of RX 580 in China, anything goes at this point.

While GALAX has introduced numerous solid graphics cards over the years, their product names are a bit of a mouthful, or in some cases just odd. The latest example being their EX OC "White Gamer" line, which, let's face it, is a tad off-putting to say the least. Of course we know that GALAX aren't racist, but you have to wonder how something like this happens. It probably comes down to marketing focusing too much on buzzwords, forgetting the context of said words in the process. In my humble opinion you can trace it back to the fact every company has to stick "Gaming" in every product name or on every box. In this case you would think the fact the product is a graphics card for gaming would be enough to get the point across.

It all started with MSI in 2013, when NVIDIA Kepler was all the rage. They released the "MSI GTX 780 Gaming", which was an amazing product, better than what most other graphics cards vendors had to offer. Competitors were surprised by the success of MSI's new cards and instead of searching into the reasons for their own products failures, their conclusion was that it must be the "Gaming" name, that drove the sales, so suddenly everybody started to fluff up their product names.

Well this here is something that we don't see every day (read, never): an RTX 2080 Ti graphics card for $999. NVIDIA did announce pricing starting at that value for this particular graphics card, but pricing, as always with NVIDIA's Founder Editions, has always creeped towards the company's self-set $1,199. EVGA, however, has just put up a product page for their GeForce RTX 2080 Ti BLACK EDITION GAMING, a dual-fan solution (much like NVIDIA's own Founders Edition) with EVGA's iCX 2 cooling expertise that's being marketed at the unicorn-like $999 price-point, with a limit of 1 per household.

NVIDIA today released GeForce 416.34 WHQL "Game Ready" drivers. These drivers provide optimization for "Call of Duty: Black Ops 4" (retail), "Soulcaliber VI," and "GRIP." Among the fixed issues with this release are buggy shadows in "Player Unknown's Battlegrounds," some games launching to a black screen when DSR is enabled, a colorful shimmering line noticed in some games when playing full-screen with G-SYNC enabled, Surround display not being available from NVIDIA Control Panel with Edge browser running, and green screen display corruption on certain games with HDR enabled. Grab the drivers from the link below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 416.34 WHQL

The change-log follows.

NVIDIA is giving finishing touches to its first GeForce RTX 20-series Mobility GPUs for notebooks, based on the "Turing" architecture, with product launches expected from Q1-2019. The company could debut the series with a high-end part first, the GeForce RTX 2080 Mobility Max-Q. The rest of the lineup includes the RTX 2070 Mobility Max-Q, RTX 2060 Ti Mobility, RTX 2060 Mobility, RTX 2050 Ti Mobility, and RTX 2050 Mobility. What's interesting about this list is that NVIDIA is limiting the Max-Q design to its top-tier RTX 2080 Mobility and RTX 2070 Mobility parts.

Max-Q is an all-encompassing laptop thermal-design methodology, which allows gaming notebook designers to come up with thinner notebooks with higher performance. One of the key aspects is special Max-Q ready variants of the GPUs, which are probably binned to run the coolest, and least voltages. With a device ID 1eab, the RTX 2080 Mobility Max-Q is based on the TU104M chip, while other SKUs could be carved from the TU106M or a chip even smaller. It's being reported that with this generation, NVIDIA is playing a more active role in helping its partners engineer their Max-Q notebooks, and helping them meet NVIDIA's strict Z-height minimums.

Back on September 27th, MSI talked candidly with PConline at the MSI Gaming New Appreciation Conference, in Shanghai. Multiple MSI executives were available to answer questions regarding products, launches, and potential issues. The first question asked was about the brewing US-Chinese trade war and if it will affect prices of graphics cards and CPUs. To which, Liao Wei, Deputy General Manager of MSI Global Multimedia Business Unit, and MSI Headquarters Graphics Card Products gave an actual answer. Stating that the since NVIDIA's GPU core is handled by a TSMC in Taiwan and memory is handled by Samsung and Hynix in South Korea and the United States respectively, there is little chance of further graphics card price hikes. However CPU side prices may increase on the Intel side, however, AMD is expected to be unaffected.

ZOTAC is preparing to launch another tier to its GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards lineup with the AMP Extreme series. Sitting above their now historic AMP Series (at least in computer hardware terms, it's already historic), the new lineup will bring much improved factory overclocking numbers, so these are certainly part of those cherry-picked chips for maximum performance. Core clocks aren't known at the time, but memory clocks have been upped to 14.4 Gbps, some 400 MHz above the factory specifications for the RTX 2080 - the only confirmed card until now.

The rest of the design is relatively straightforward, with a metallic backplate, a tri-90 mm fan design, 2x 8-pin power connectors, a 16+4 phases power delivery system, and a much increased TDP of 280 W (over the reference 215 W). Of course, there's RGB lighting as well, but that's not the important thing here: the cherry-picked chips are. It's unclear os of yet when this series will hit the market, but expect them sooner rather than later. ZOTAC is apparently also working on a AMP Core series, which should find its differentiation over the factory overclocking specifics.

Gigabyte is a little bit late to the party, but better late than never, for sure. The company has launched four new graphic cards -AORUS Geforce RTX 2080 Ti XTREME 11G, AORUS Geforce RTX 2080 Ti 11G, AORUS Geforce RTX 2080 XTREME 8G. All of them are equipped with "top-of-the-line" overclocked GPUs, and the AORUS Engine software makes it easy to control clock speeds, fan performance or power target. These cards feature the RGB three-ring light effect, WINDFORCE 3x 100mm Stack Fan, and 7 video outputs.

Those fans allow to reduce the graphics card length, but they also generate more wind pressure and therefore improve dissipation not only for the GPU but also for VRAM and MOSFET. According to Gigabyte these are the only GeForce RTX20 Series products that offer 7 video outputs: 3 HDMI, 3 DP and one USB-C for greater flexibility when connecting different monitors without any adaptors. There's a new aero-space graded PCB for these cards, that have a 12+2 Phase PCB design (RTX 2080 Xtreme) with a 16+3 phase PCB design for the RTX 2080 Ti Xtreme.

Lenovo unveiled the Titanium Enterprise NCC-1701A, a gaming PC with the phrase "enterprise" in its name. Only they aren't referring to the market-segment, but arguably the most famous ship, real or fictional, to bear the name "USS Enterprise." This gaming desktop looks like a scale-model of the Star Trek starship USS Enterprise from TOS (the original series) cinematic renditions, in which Captain Kirk and his motley crew get an upgrade to a modernized starship bearing the Starfleet registry NCC-1701-A. Perhaps the only perfectly-overlookable bits Lenovo got wrong is that bulge near the drive section, between the warp nacelles, because it accommodates some cutting-edge hardware.

Its warp-core so to speak, is a 9th generation Intel Core processor, which could very well be 8-core. In charge of its fire-power is an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card. Other drool-worthy specs include 32 GB of DDR4 memory, 1 TB M.2 SSD + 2 TB HDD in charge of storage, Killer DoubleShot networking, and RGB LED embellishments all around its body. Lenovo is serious about bringing the Titanium Enterprise NCC-1701A to market, even if in small quantities. This is not a concept. Now if only the saucer section opened up from the top to reveal a Blu-ray drive, Discman-style.

In a continued effort to support the PC platform, BANDAI NAMCO previously announced they would be releasing Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown on PC. At the time, there was no mention of what the game's system requirements would be. However, thanks to an NVIDIA blog post, we now know not only the game's system requirements but an estimate on system performance as well- at least with their own graphics solutions.

Overall, the minimum and recommended requirements appear to be quite reasonable. BANDAI NAMCO even went so far as to make note that the recommended requirements are representative of what is needed to run the game at the 1920x1080 resolution with max settings. NVIDIA's own testing backs up those claims with the GeForce GTX 1060 offering a comfortable 100 FPS at 1920x1080, and 60 FPS at 2560x1440 resolutions. Meanwhile, those wanting to push the game at 4K will need a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti or better which should offer a steady 60+ FPS.

While conducting our first reviews for NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti we noticed surprisingly high non-gaming power consumption from NVIDIA's latest flagship cards. Back then, we reached out to NVIDIA who confirmed that this is a known issue which will be fixed in an upcoming driver.

Today the company released version 411.70 of their GeForce graphics driver, which, besides adding GameReady support for new titles, includes the promised fix for RTX 2080 & RTX 2080 Ti.

We gave this new version a quick spin, using our standard graphics card power consumption testing methodology, to check how things have been improved.

MSI, a world leader in gaming hardware, has partnered with ESL for its MSI Gaming Arena (MGA) 2018 World Championship and as the exclusive gaming sponsor of the ESL One 2018 Grand Finals at the Barclays Center in New York on September 29 and 30.MGA 2018 World Championship
Before the Grand Final, MSI Gaming Arena (MGA) 2018 will host the world's top Counter-Strike: Global Offensive teams fighting for the coveted MGA Trophy and $60,000 prize pool on September 30 at the Barclays Center in New York. After the regional qualifiers, the four remaining teams will secure their spot in the MGA 2018 CS:GO Grand Finals.

NVIDIA today announced official availability dates for what will forever be engraved in history as "the cheapest Turing" option - which contrary to what that might lead you to expect, isn't cheap at all. NVIDIA's RTX 2070 graphics card will be available starting October 17th, bringing the benefits of raytracing acceleration to a much lower price-point than the already-launched RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards.

That said, the RTX 2070 will still retail for $499 - a full $120 higher than NVIDIA's last-gen GTX 1070, and that's not counting what's being less-than-amicably called the "NVIDIA tax", which brings Founders' Editions pricing of the graphics cards up to $599, and allows AIB to increase pricing of their own designs up to that level - or higher. It's not a cheap option - especially considering how the RTX 2070 is now being built in the TU106 silicon, a smaller counterpart to the full-fledged TU104, and in contrast to the previous GTX 1070, which was built from the same chip as the GTX 1080).

EVGA today announced availability of their X1 Precision software suite for NVIDIA's RTX 20-series graphics cards. The Precision X1 software features a brand new layout, completely new codebase, new features and more, with EVGA saying it's faster, easier to user, and overall better than ever.

The Precision X12 includes a built-in overclock scanner, which automatically discovers your graphics' card hidden overclocking potential algorithmically. It also features an adjustable frequency curve, multi-GPU fan curve controls, and RGB LED control. And interestingly, in its press-release, EVGA themselves said that GTX support was coming soon - whether this refers to still-to-be-launched 20-series graphics cards, or just expanded support for pre-Turing graphics cards, is unclear.

NVIDIA could launch successors to its GeForce GTX 1060 series and GTX 1050 series only by 2019, according to a statement by an ASUS representative, speaking with PC Watch. This could mean that the high-end RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, and RTX 2070, could be the only new SKUs for Holiday 2018 from NVIDIA, alongside cut-rate GeForce GTX 10-series SKUs. This could be a combination of swelling inventories of 10-series GPUs, and insufficient volumes of mid-range RTX 20-series chips, should NVIDIA even decide to extend real-time ray-tracing to mid-range graphics cards.

The way NVIDIA designed the RTX 2070 out of the physically smaller TU106 chip instead of TU104 leads us to believe that NVIDIA could carve out the GTX 1060-series successor based on this chip, since the RTX 2070 maxes it out, and NVIDIA needs to do something with imperfect chips. An even smaller chip (probably half-a-TU104?) could power the GTX 1050-series successor.

Videocardz is reporting that NVIDIA has moved their NDA dates for reviews on their RTX 2080 graphics cards to be published. They cite difficulties for review websites in securing samples, delays in shipment, and even unavailable driver stacks that would allow for reviewers to conduct their jobs with the usual professionalism. Remember that the original NDA timeframe for reviews, as reported by Videocardz, was set at September 17th, which would leave reviewers from today with less than a full week to conduct their testing.

The website reports that "only a handful" of reviewers have gotten their cards already, and that reviews for NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080 have now lined up with the NDA set for the RTX 2080 Ti, on September 19th, leaving reviewers with two huge card launches and a single deadline, just before the cards' general availability on September 20th.

NVIDIA CFO Colette Kress, speaking in the company's latest post-results financial analyst call, confirmed that NVIDIA isn't retiring its GeForce GTX 10-series products anytime soon, and that the series could coexist with the latest GeForce RTX series, leading up to Holiday-2018, which ends with the year. "We will be selling probably for the holiday season, both our Turing and our Pascal overall architecture," Kress stated. "We want to be successful for the holiday season, both our Turing and our Pascal overall architecture," she added. NVIDIA is expected to launch not just its RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080, but also its RTX 2070 towards the beginning of Q4-2018, and is likely to launch its "sweetspot" segment RTX 2060 by the end of the year.

NVIDIA reportedly has mountains of unsold GeForce GTX 10-series inventory, in the wake of not just a transition to the new generation, but also a slump in GPU-accelerated crypto-currency mining. The company could fine-tune prices of its popular 10-series SKUs such as the GTX 1080 Ti, the GTX 1080, GTX 1070 Ti, and GTX 1060, to sell them at slimmer margins. To consumers this could mean a good opportunity to lap up 4K-capable gaming hardware; but for NVIDIA, it could mean those many fewer takers for its ambitious RTX Technology in its formative year.

We are all still awaiting how NVIDIA's RTX 2000 series of GPUs will fare in independent reviews, but that has not stopped the rumor mill from extrapolating. There have been alleged leaks of the RTX 2080 Ti's performance and now we see HWiNFO add support to an unannounced NVIDIA Turing microarchitecture chip, the TU106. As a reminder, the currently announced members in RTX series are based off TU102 (RTX 2080 Ti), and TU104 (RTX 2080, RTX 2070). It is logical to expect a smaller die for upcoming RTX cards based on NVIDIA's history, and we may well see an RTX 2060 using the TU106 chip.

This addition to HWiNFO is to be taken with a grain of salt, however, as they have been wrong before. Even recently, they had added support for what, at the time, was speculated to be NVIDIA Volta microarchitecture which we now know as Turing. This has not stopped others from speculating further, however, as we see 3DCenter.org give their best estimates on how TU106 may fare in terms of die size, shader and TMU count, and more. Given that TSMC's 7 nm node will likely be preoccupied with Apple iPhone production through the end of this year, NVIDIA may well be using the same 12 nm FinFET process that TU102 and TU104 are being manufactured on. This mainstream GPU segment is NVIDIA's bread-and-butter for gross revenue, and so it is possible we may see an announcement with even retail availability towards the end of Q4 2018 to target holiday shoppers.

Caveat emptor, take this with a grain of salt, and the usual warnings when dealing with rumors about hardware performance come to mind here foremost. That said, a Turkish YouTuber, PC Hocasi TV, put up and then quickly took back down a video going through his benchmark results for the new NVIDIA GPU flagship, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti across a plethora of game titles. The results, which you can see by clicking to read the whole story, are not out of line but some of the game titles involve a beta stage (Battlefield 5) and an online shooter (PUBG) so there is a second grain of salt needed to season this gravy.

As it stands, 3DCenter.org put together a nice summary of the relative performance of the RTX 2080 Ti compared to the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti from last generation. Based on these results, the RTX 20T0 Ti is approximately 37.5% better than the GTX 1080 Ti as far as average FPS goes and ~30% better on minimum FPS. These are in line with expectations from hardware analysts and the timing of these results tying in to when the GPU launches does lead some credence to the numbers. Adding to this leak is yet another, this time based off a 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, which we will see past the break.

NVIDIA debuted its R399 series of GeForce software, which could be its final sequence before GeForce RTX family of graphics cards are released to market, likely accompanied by a new series of GeForce software (likely R400 series?). Version 399.07 WHQL is "Game Ready" for "Battlefield V Open Beta," F1 2018, "Immortal: Unchained," Pro Evolution Soccer 2019, "Strange Brigade," and "Switchblade." The drivers also add SLI profiles for F1 2018 and "Immortal: Unchained."

GeForce 399.07 WHQL addresses a number of bugs, including blurry screen noticed on "Rainbow Six: Siege" with TAA dialed up to 100%; diagonal screen-tearing on notebooks with MSHybrid; incorrect OpenGL rendering context on GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1070; missing textures in "Doom" (2016) with the Vulkan renderer; random BSODs on Oculus VR software; stability issues with "LA Noire VR," and stuttering in some exotic configurations on "Call of Duty: Black Ops 4." A key bug with G-Sync stuttering on machines upgrading to Windows 10 1803 has also been fixed. Grab the driver from the link below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 399.07 WHQL Software

PNY has taken the lid of their RTX graphics card lineup, revealing a total of 9 (at least, for now) models that will be sold under the new graphics card lineup. For now, PNY's store only offers purchase options for the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 graphics cards, with the RTX 2070 only featuring product pages, but no pricing information.

PNY's product differentiation stands, as always, with factory overclocking and the cooling solution employed. There are two RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards - the RTX 2080 Ti 11GB Blower, which caters to the audiences that NVIDIA has left behind with their in-house designs (which now all feature a dual-fan cooling system), and the RTX 2080 Ti 11GB XLR8 Gaming Overclocked Edition ($1,299) with a triple-fan, LED-infused design. For now, there's no information on finalized clock speeds, and both cards feature NVIDIA's reference 1525 MHz core clocks on their specs listing.

After announcing compatible waterblocks for NVIDIA's upcoming RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards, Alphacool has announced incoming availability of RTX 2070-specific solutions as well. The Eisblock GPX-N has been thoroughly designed for the silicon chip powering NVIDIA's RTX 2070, and will be available in both Acetal and Pleci finishes. The Acetal version will be available from €114,79, while the Plexi version will run you €149,79. Both these waterblocks join the previously-announced solutions in their September 20th availability, with pre-orders being online from distributors including Aquatuning.

The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is indeed based on an ASIC codenamed "TU102." NVIDIA was referring to this 775 mm² chip when talking about the 18.5 billion-transistor count in its keynote. The company also provided a breakdown of its various "cores," and a block-diagram. The GPU is still laid out like its predecessors, but each of the 72 streaming multiprocessors (SMs) packs RT cores and Tensor cores in addition to CUDA cores.

The TU102 features six GPCs (graphics processing clusters), which each pack 12 SMs. Each SM packs 64 CUDA cores, 8 Tensor cores, and 1 RT core. Each GPC packs six geometry units. The GPU also packs 288 TMUs and 96 ROPs. The TU102 supports a 384-bit wide GDDR6 memory bus, supporting 14 Gbps memory. There are also two NVLink channels, which NVIDIA plans to later launch as its next-generation multi-GPU technology.