The Card

The ASUS RTX 2080 Super STRIX OC looks identical to the same model without the "Super", which of course makes economical sense. On the back, you'll find a high-quality metal backplate. Dimensions of the card are 30.0 x 13.5 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.

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, this enables support for 8K@30Hz with 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.

At CES 2019, NVIDIA announced that all their graphics cards will now support VESA Adaptive Sync (aka FreeSync). While only a small number of FreeSync monitors have been fully qualified with G-SYNC, users can enable the feature in NVIDIA's control panel regardless of whether the monitor is certified or not.


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


These points let you manually test the various voltage domains of the card by using a multimeter and possibly making some tweaks through soldering.


A little button lets you turn off the RGB lighting of the card without the use of software.


ASUS includes a dual-BIOS feature on their STRIX OC, which lets you switch to a quiet BIOS with fan stop and a lower fan curve.


You also get two 4-pin PWM fan headers to sync your case fan to the graphics card's fans and an addressable RGB header other RGB components can be connected to.


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

Disassembly

ASUS is using an elaborate system of six heatpipes on their cooler.


Once the main heatsink is removed, a black baseplate becomes visible, which provides cooling for the VRM circuitry and memory chips.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.

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