The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti hype is big and performance numbers are scant, but we ha
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Real-time ray tracing, tensor cores, VirtualLink USB: The hype field around the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti is big, and performance numbers are scant, but they’re set to release to the public on Sept. 20. Much to our excitement, a few representatives of this new generation of Nvidia cards landed on our doorstep earlier this week. Time to get the testbed desktops updated and the big-screen 4K monitors fired up.
As of this writing, we have the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition, and the Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Amp, with more cards to come. The first two are Nvidia’s own versions of its new high-end cards, slightly up-clocked from the company’s stock GPU speeds. The Founders Edition RTX 2080 runs $799, while the RTX 2080 Ti will set you back $1,199. Meanwhile, the Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Amp is a third-party add-in board, or AIB for short, with more fans and a more aggressive approach. It retails for $839.99, $40 more than its Founders Edition brother.
With these three components in hand, let’s take a look at what you can expect to see when you open up their boxes.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com .
As expected, the box for the GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition is classy and flashy, bedecked in black and green in keeping with the Nvidia brand. The look has been tweaked, but it’s the same basic box design we’ve seen in previous generations of Nvidia card.
The RTX 2080 Founders Edition is overclocked over GPU stock by about 5 percent. As a result, the Founders Edition cards are a little different than their predecessors in Nvidia’s GeForce 1000 series, which were, in essence, reference cards at stock speeds. This card will sell for $799; Nvidia notes that card partners will have RTX 2080 designs that start at $699.
Opening the box, the first thing you’ll notice about the Founders Edition RTX cards is the pair of fans each one has on its face. The Founders Edition cards of the «Pascal» generation employed a single fan, which pushed air straight through the card and out the backplane in what’s known as a «blower fan» design. This is more of an open-air approach.
Depending on the manufacturer, how aggressively that maker clocks the GPU out of the box, and the resulting airflow needs, some variants of the GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti will have three fans for even better airflow. (Stay tuned for one of those.) The two fans on the Founders Edition RTX 2080, though, help keep the card to a manageable size.
As you can see here, also in the box is another small box, more about which in a moment.
In that small black box, you’ll note a dongle included along with the RTX 2080. That’s the only accessory that comes with the graphics card.
A close-up of the included dongle: It’s a DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter, for plugging in legacy displays. That said, if you’re buying one of these cards for all-out gaming, we expect that the monitor you’re using will have a ready-for-2018 HDMI or DisplayPort input. We expect, in most cases, this dongle will be used only for secondary displays.
The RTX 2080 Founders Edition measures 10.5 inches long, the same length as the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition cards that came before it. The backplate is a full-cover design in solid silver metal, with etching that suggests circuit traces down the length of it.
On to our next card, which is another card built around the RTX 2080 GPU. Zotac is a third-party Nvidia card partner, and its Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Amp has three fans, potentially making for better cooling than the GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition. It does take up a lot more space, though, with a length of 12.3 inches—more than a foot long.
The Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Amp has what looks like will be the usual array of display connectors for RTX cards on its backplane. It has a single USB Type-C port, three DisplayPort 1.4 connections, and an HDMI 2.0b port. The USB Type-C port supports VirtualLink, a connection standard meant for use in future VR headsets; more than a few big players in that space have professed support for it.
Feeding juice to Zotac’s Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Amp are two power-supply-cable connectors, one of them a six-pin and another with eight pins. Let’s hope you didn’t throw out those extra cables that came with your modular power supply!
As mentioned, you get three fans on this card, versus the two on the Founders Edition RTX 2080. The ones on the Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Amp can be individually configured in Zotac’s own FireStorm tweaking and overclocking software, which is due for an update soon, according to the company.
The backplate of this card has a cutaway to the back of the GPU itself. The slogans «Live to Game» and «Zotac Gaming» are a more branded approach than the plainer, etched backplate on the Nvidia Founders Edition cards.
As you can see at the right of the card, because of the extra cooling, the fans and their cooling hardware overlap the actual PCB and the backplate.
The Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Amp supports what Zotac calls its «Spectra» lighting system; you can customize the color, brightness, and lighting of certain parts of the card. Like the fan control, the on-card lighting is controlled via the FireStorm utility.
Here’s the box of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition. It’s the same as the RTX 2080’s packaging, apart from the «Ti» notation.
Like the RTX 2080, this card is a slight overclock from GPU stock (1,545MHz to 1,635MHz). Nvidia is selling this card for $1,199; in theory, RTX 2080 Ti cards from third parties will start at $999, but most unveiled so far are around the same price as the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition.
Bearing a very, very similar look to the GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition, the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition features the same two 13-blade fans and an aluminum shell.
Indeed, once we got it out of the box, it was clear that the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition looks and feels exactly like the RTX 2080 Founders Edition, apart from the model name on the front.
