The Card

The ASUS ROG Strix RTX 2080 OC uses a familiar-looking yet new DirectCU III cooling solution, which is about 2 cm taller than standard. Dimensions of the card are 30x13 cm.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include two standard DisplayPort 1.4a, two HDMI 2.0b, and a VirtualLink connector, which is basically USB-C with DisplayPort routing and USB-PD, so a single cable can power, display, and take input from your VR HMD. You also get two 4-pin PWM fan headers to sync your case fan to the graphics card and an addressable RGB header.

NVIDIA has updated their display engine with the Turing microarchitecture, which now supports DisplayPort 1.4a with support for VESA's nearly lossless Display Stream Compression (DSC). Combined together, this enables support for 8K@30Hz using a single cable, or 8K@60Hz when DSC is turned on. For context, DisplayPort 1.4a is the latest version of the standard that was published in April, 2018.


The board uses two 8-pin power connectors. This input configuration is specified for up to 375 watts of power draw.


With Turing, NVIDIA is using NVLink as a physical layer for its next-generation SLI technology. NVLink provides sufficient bandwidth for multi-GPU rendering 8K 60 Hz, 4K 120 Hz, and other such bandwidth-heavy display resolutions. It's a point-to-point link between your GPUs, and so latencies will be lower compared to pushing data through the PCI-Express bus.


We shine the light from a self-leveling line laser onto the card, which shows no sagging.

Disassembly

Six nickel-plated copper heat pipes meander their way through an aluminium dual fin-stack heatsink.


A base plate conveys heat from the memory and VRM to the main heatsink.


The backplate is slightly disappointing. Unlike every other card we tested today, there are no thermal pads between the hot areas of the PCB and this backplate, though there is an ROG logo LED ornament. It's the intent that counts.


A small SMT button lets you quickly turn off all LED lighting on the card. This setting is remembered while the card has power, so it persists through reboots, just not power offs.


These mounts let you manually test the various voltage domains of this card using a multi-meter, and possibly make some tweaks through soldering.

On the next page, we dive deep into the PCB layout and VRM configuration.