Introduction

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 20 Super series launch in two phases across July is topped off by the new GeForce RTX 2080 Super. 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 reason to launch 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 outperformed the RTX 2070, and the RX 5700 beat the RTX 2060, forcing 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 was carved out from the same "TU104" silicon and since the original RTX 2070 maxed 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 would need to refresh the RTX 2080 lest it gets cannibalized by the RTX 2070 Super. We hence 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, so it can justify selling it at a $200 premium, at $700 and avoid tapping into the larger "TU102" silicon, which would escalate 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 a further 100 MHz, to 1815 MHz (up 6 percent). Lastly, the company increased the memory bandwidth by 11 percent by dialing memory clock speeds up to 15.5 Gbps using fast 16 Gbps-rated memory chips.

NVIDIA is also allowing its add-in card (AIC) partners to innovate custom-design RTX 2080 Super graphics cards with generous factory-overclocked speeds and meaty cooling solutions. With prices starting at $700, NVIDIA partners have $200 to mark up prices of their premium offerings because beyond $900, you should aim for the RTX 2080 Ti.

In this review, we have with us the MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Super Gaming X Trio. The card is based on the same "Gaming X Trio" board design as both the RTX 2070 Super and RTX 2080 cards with the name. The card uses a strong 10+2 phase VRM and the humongous Tri Frozr cooling solution that mates a multi fin-stack heatsink with three independently controllable fans and idle fan stop. The card also ships with a 1845 MHz boost frequency, while the memory is left untouched at 15.5 Gbps. MSI is pricing the card at $740, which is a $40 premium over the $700 MSRP for the RTX 2080 Super.