The Card

The Palit RTX 2080 GamePro is one of the rare custom-design cards to both be dual-slot and no taller than the Founders Edition, which is a boon for compatibility. Dimensions of the card are 29.5 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 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 6-pin + 8-pin power connectors. 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 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.

Disassembly

Palit's cooling solution uses five 6 mm-thick copper heat pipes, which pass through an aluminium fin stack.


The aluminium backplate draws some heat over thermal pads.

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