The Card

MSI's RTX 2080 Ti Gaming X Trio features high build quality with lavish use of metal all around. Dimensions of the card are 33x14 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 a combination of two 8-pin and one 6-pin power connectors, which are together rated for 450 W.


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 out of the box. There is a reinforcement brace included.

Disassembly

MSI is using a complex dual aluminium fin-stack cooler design that draws heat from the GPU through seven heat pipes and is ventilated by three fans. These fans turn off when the GPU is idling.


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


A solid three-dimensional-looking aluminium backplate helps cool the card from behind. Thermal pads transfer some of the heat from the GPU and memory areas to the backplate from behind the PCB.