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.

Packaging and Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Documentation
• ASUS cable binders

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.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt-modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use them in your articles or forum posts.



High-res versions are also available (front, back).