The Card

EVGA's RTX 2080 Super Black looks similar to the company's other Turing offers, which of course makes economical sense from a manufacturing perspective. Unlike the NVIDIA Founders Edition a backplate is not available. Dimensions of the card are 26.5 x 11.5 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a, an 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 a 6-pin and an 8-pin power connector. This input configuration is specified for up to 300 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 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

EVGA is using six heatpipes on their thermal solution to transport heat away quickly.


Once the main heatsink is removed, a secondary cooling plate becomes visible. It provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.

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