The Card

The EVGA RTX 2080 Super FTW3 looks identical to the RTX 2080 FTW3, which of course makes economical sense. On the back, you'll find a high-quality metal backplate. We measured dimensions of the card to be 30.0 x 14.0 cm.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a, one 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.


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.


EVGA's card comes with a dual BIOS feature, which lets you switch between the normal and an "OC" BIOS. The differences are that the OC BIOS has idle fan stop disabled and runs a slightly more aggressive fan curve. The power limits are identical.


Near the back of the card, you'll find this fan header, which lets you connect a case fan to your graphics card. That fan will run synced with the card fans, which means it'll stop when the card is idle and only ramp up as the GPU heats up during gaming.


If you want to synchronize external RGB hardware with the lighting effects on the FTW3, connect your gear to this header.

Disassembly

EVGA is using six heatpipes, most of which are extra-wide, to keep the GPU cool.


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


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.