Introduction

NVIDIA launched the GeForce RTX 20-series in September last year, with support for several new technologies, like machine learning and RTX Raytracing. This feature is so big for NVIDIA that it has changed the naming of their GeForce cards from "GTX" to "RTX". The company's new flagship ushered in new performance levels, delivering 4K 60 FPS in most titles because of enhancements made in the Turing architecture.

The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is armed with 4,352 CUDA cores and 68 RT cores that accelerate real-time raytracing. Also included are 544 tensor cores that accelerate AI neural-net building, training, and inference. In the gamer context, tensor cores run NVIDIA's AI denoiser for DXR and enable the fascinating DLSS performance enhancement.

Today, we are bringing you the ASUS ROG GeForce GTX 2080 Ti Matrix Platinum review. ASUS Republic of Gamers Matrix is the company's apex graphics card brand reserved for the fastest GPUs of a generation. These cards have historically been equipped with the highest overclocking potential, hand-binned GPU and memory components, most effective cooling solution, and highest factory-overclock ASUS has to offer, which includes a memory OC as well. With the high-margin GeForce RTX 2080 Ti being priced enormously high, starting at $1150, it was only natural for ASUS to come up with the ROG Matrix product.



The ROG Matrix brand has also been the bleeding edge of ASUS's engineering muscle backed by the company's deep R&D pockets. With the ROG RTX 2080 Ti Matrix, ASUS has an answer to the ugliness problem of high-end graphics cards that come with factory-fitted closed-loop liquid cooling solutions. Instead of shipping the graphics card with a waterblock and separate radiator/fan combo, ASUS has decided to fully integrate their watercooling solution under the cooler shroud. This means the card's pump-block, a short pair of coolant tubes, and a radiator now sit right above the card's PCB and are ventilated by the cooler's three fans.

Underneath all this is a PCB that is identical to the PCB from their ASUS RTX 2080 Ti STRIX. ASUS explains that this gives them the opportunity to do binning from a large sample size—all STRIX PCB/GPU combos are tested and the top 5% make it on to Matrix cards.

The ASUS ROG GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Matrix competes with the crème de la crème of flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards, such as the MSI RTX 2080 Ti Lightning Z, AORUS RTX 2080 Ti Xtreme WaterForce, and EVGA RTX 2080 Ti KINGPIN. At $1900, it's one of the most expensive graphics cards out there. In this review, we put the ASUS RTX 2080 Ti Matrix Platinum through its paces.