The Card

Although not up to the level of the Gaming X Trio, the new RTX 2080 Ti Duke series has improved quality significantly over past generations, which used gobs of plastic. This card isn't as tall as the Gaming X and should fit into most cases. Dimensions of the card are 31.5 x 12.5 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 together, this enables support for 8K@30Hz using 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.


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 8K 60 Hz, 4K 120 Hz, and other such bandwidth-heavy display resolutions. It's a point-to-point link between your GPUs and so, latencies will be lower compared to pushing data through the PCI-Express bus.


We shine the light from a self-leveling line laser onto the card, which shows no sagging. A reinforcement brace is included in case you want to tighten down the card some more.

Disassembly

MSI is using five heatpipes, some of which loop around the base to pick up more heat.


A metal base-plate conveys heat drawn from the memory to the heatsink.


This is probably the first MSI Duke series card with a proper backplate. This one is functional and draws some heat over thermal pads.