Unboxed

The bottom half of the box holds the card and an accessory box in place. The card is wrapped in an anti-static bag, while the box contains two pieces of literature: a Quick-start Guide and a Support Guide, and an adapter that converts DisplayPort to DVI-D (no analog/VGA wiring).


Out of the anti-static bag, the GeForce RTX 2080 shimmers like a piece of jewelry. NVIDIA has upped its game of reference design, and the RTX 20-series Founders Edition cards renew the design standards and "wow-factor" generated by the very first GeForce GTX TITAN cards. The "Pascal" generation Founders Edition cooler designs were barely a more high-poly version of that design.


As you can clearly tell, NVIDIA has disposed of the single lateral blower design in favor of a twin axial fan design, which enables the fans to stay off when the card is idling since the underlying heatsink is better ventilated for passive cooling. In a lateral blower design, turning off the fan would cook and smother the air-channel heatsink.

Topside, you get a glimpse of the underlying aluminium fin-stack heatsink, which appears to lack traditional heat-pipes and uses a flat base-plate. This side also gives you access to the power inputs, 6-pin + 8-pin PCIe power, and the NVLink-based new-generation SLI connector that's concealed under a rubber cap.


The backplate is solid metal, and has a rich feel to it. It's also ridged to increase surface area, which could help dissipate some of the card's overall heat gathered from the axial airflow of the fans.


The business end of the card is the rear I/O shield, which now has a matte gunmetal gray finish to it, including a classy NVIDIA logo. Connectors include three DisplayPort 1.4a, an HDMI 2.0b, and a VirtuaLink port. This port could revolutionize display connectivity, particularly for VR headsets, as it combines DisplayPort, USB 3.1, and power-delivery into a single connector.

We won't take the card apart just yet, because we haven't finished testing it. It's important for us to do power, thermal, and noise testing using the untouched card to ensure we actually measure the experience you'll get when buying the product yourself. You'll have to wait for our comprehensive review of these cards for that, which will come out very soon.