The Card

The Palit RTX 2080 Super WGRP looks identical to the company's Super JetStream version of the RTX 2080, just with the cooler in white. On the back, you'll find a high-quality metal backplate, which is white, too. Dimensions of the card are 29.5 x 13.0 cm.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a, an 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 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 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.


Palit's RTX 2080 Super WGRP comes with a dual-BIOS feature. The second BIOS has fan stop enabled and runs a quieter fan curve. Power limits are identical.

Disassembly

Palit is using five copper heatpipes to quickly transport heat away from the graphics chip.


The backplate is made from metal to protect the card against damage during handling and installation. The white component on the right side of the picture is the lighting panel for the backplate RGB illumination.

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