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. 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 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 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 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

Be sure to have a well-equipped toolkit to take this card apart. You'll come across not just Philips screws of various sizes, but also hex bolts.


Not only is this card very difficult to take apart, but NVIDIA has also made some design choices that lower repairability. It uses a combination of solid thermal pads and cheaper spray-on thermal pads over some warm components (blue). These don't seem to be reusable.


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. The fans do not turn off when the GPU is idling.


NVIDIA is introducing a solid-looking aluminium backplate with its Founders Edition cards. Thermal pads convey heat from behind the VRM, memory, and GPU to the backplate, so it helps offload some of it.

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