Introduction

In this review, we have with us the ASUS GeForce RTX 2080 Super STRIX OC, which is the company's flagship model for their RTX 2080 Super lineup. The card follows the theme established by previous Turing STRIX cards and comes with a backplate and a large triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution. As expected, idle fan stop is included, and the company's dual-BIOS features with a "quiet" BIOS is also available. Other features are the possibility to connect external RGB hardware to the graphics card to sync the visuals and two fan headers that run at the same speed as the graphics card fans. We couldn't get an exact pricing out of ASUS, but assume a price point of $800 seems reasonable, and matches pricing in non-USD markets.

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080 Super was launched as part of the company's two-phase Turing "Super" launch across July. Designed to displace the RTX 2080 from the company's product stack at $700, the RTX 2080 Super not just maxes out the 12 nm "TU104" Turing silicon, but also comes with higher GPU clock speeds and faster 15.5 Gbps GDDR6 memory. NVIDIA's launch of the RTX 2080 Super may have been necessitated by, of all things, the $399 Radeon RX 5700 XT.

AMD's Radeon RX 5700-series "Navi" launch destabilized NVIDIA's lineup. The RX 5700 XT outperforms the RTX 2070, and the RX 5700 beats the RTX 2060, which forced NVIDIA to launch the RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super to recapture the $399 and $499 price points. This had a ripple effect on the RTX 2080 because the RTX 2070 Super is carved out from the same "TU104" silicon, and the original RTX 2070 maxes out the "TU106". The RTX 2070 Super performs within 6–8 percent of the RTX 2080 while being $200 cheaper. Custom-design, factory-overclocked RTX 2070 Super cards narrow the performance gap to as little as 3–4 percent. NVIDIA hence had to refresh the RTX 2080 lest it gets cannibalized by the RTX 2070 Super. We thus have the new RTX 2080 Super.



NVIDIA's objectives with the RTX 2080 Super are to increase the performance gap with the RTX 2070 Super to justify selling it at a $200 premium, at $700, and avoid tapping into the larger "TU102" silicon, which would increase costs. The company's approach hence is to supercharge the "TU104". For starters, all 3,072 CUDA cores physically present on the chip are enabled. The original RTX 2080 only features 2,944 of them. Secondly, the GPU Boost frequency is dialed up by another 100 MHz, to 1815 MHz (up 6 percent). Lastly, the company increased the memory bandwidth 11 percent by dialing memory clock speeds up to 15.5 Gbps with fast 16 Gbps-rated memory chips.