The Card

Visually, the RTX 2080 Super AMP Extreme looks identical to the company's RTX 2080 non-Super AMP Extreme, which of course makes a lot of economical sense. On the back, you'll find a high-quality metal backplate. Dimensions of the card are 32.0 x 13.5 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, 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.

Disassembly

Zotac is using six heatpipes and a copper base on their cooler.


Once the main heatsink is removed, a black baseplate becomes visible, which provides cooling for the VRM circuitry.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during handling and installation. Note how the backplate actually partially wraps around the card for added protection and improved looks.

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