EVGA's GeForce RTX 2080 Ti XC Ultra is the company's second-strongest RTX 2080 Ti variant—right behind the recently announced FTW3. Unlike the Founders Edition, the XC Ultra comes with a thicker triple-slot cooler design, which will help with temperatures and fan noise. The triple slot cooler is what sets it apart from the regular XC (non-Ultra), too. Out of the box, the card runs slightly higher clocks than the Founders Edition: 1650 MHz, up from 1625 MHz.

Averaged over all our benchmark tests at 4K resolution, the EVGA RTX 2080 Ti XC Ultra ends up 2% faster than the Founders Edition—not a lot. Compared to the RTX 2080, the performance uplift is 32%, and it's 58% faster than the RTX 2070. AMD's fastest, the RX Vega 64, is only half as fast. With those incredible performance numbers, the RTX 2080 Ti is your best choice for fluid 4K gaming.

Every single Turing card we tested so far will sit in its power limit all the time during gaming. This means the highest boost clocks are never reached during regular gameplay, which is in stark contrast to Pascal, where custom designs were almost always running at peak boost clocks. It simply looks like with Turing, the bottleneck is no longer temperature, but power consumption or, rather, the BIOS-defined limit for it. EVGA is using the Founders Edition PCB on the XC Ultra, so it's not surprising to see the same stock power limit of 260 W. The manual power limit adjustment range has been increased though, from 320 W to 338 W, which definitely comes in handy.

With only 71°C, temperatures of the EVGA RTX 2080 Ti XC Ultra are good and still leave tons of headroom for manual overclocking—or increasing the power limit. In idle, the card will turn off its fans completely for the perfect noise-free experience during desktop work, Internet browsing, and light gaming. When fully loaded with demanding games, the fans will spin up, but are still quiet, especially for a card in this performance class. With 35 dBA, the noise levels are 2 dBA quieter than the Founders Edition. The only custom design we tested so far that's significantly quieter is the ASUS STRIX with its "quiet" BIOS enabled. The EVGA XC Ultra doesn't have the biggest heatsink of all RTX 2080 Tis by far, yet achieves a great balance between temperatures and fan noise.

With a price of $1,250, the EVGA RTX 2080 Ti XC Ultra is $50 more expensive than the Founders Edition. While the card is better than the Founders Edition in every regard except for looks, which the FE has a tight grip on, I'm not sure if an extra $50 is justified. This also puts the card in a weaker position against numerous competing cards that are sitting at the $1200 Founders price point, trying to lure in buyers with larger, flashier coolers. EVGA should try to bring their price down another fifty bucks to match these offerings.