The Card

The GeForce RTX 20-series Founders Edition cards are the first graphics cards designed by NVIDIA to use a dual-fan axial-blower cooling solution. Lateral-flow coolers probably weren't cutting it, and NVIDIA probably didn't want to take AMD's route with bulky AIO liquid coolers. The RTX 2080 Super matches the RTX 2080 exactly in looks and size with the only exception being the "Super" markings on the backplate and cooler. Dimensions of the card are 27.0 x 11.5 cm.


Installation requires two 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 one 8-pin and one 6-pin power connector. This input configuration is specified for up to 300 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.

Disassembly

An aluminium base-plate touches a vapor-chamber plate, which in turn is soldered to an aluminium fin stack that is ventilated by the pair of fans.


NVIDIA's backplate has a curve near its back, which makes it wrap around the card slightly, giving it a much more solid impression.

On the next page, we dive deep into the PCB layout and VRM configuration.