Meet the GeForce RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition

Taking a closer look at the RTX 2080 Super, there aren’t too many surprises to be found. Since we’re dealing with a mid-generation kicker here, NVIDIA has opted to stick with their original RTX 2080 reference designs for the new card, rather than design wholly new boards. This has allowed them to get the new card out relatively quickly, and to be honest there’s not a whole lot NVIDIA could do here that wouldn’t be superficial. As a result, the RTX 2080 Super is more or less identical to the RTX 2080 it replaces.

GeForce RTX 20 Series Card Compariaon
  RTX 2080
Super
Founders Edition
RTX 2080 Super
(Reference Specs)
Base Clock 1650MHz 1650MHz
Boost Clock 1815MHz 1815MHz
Memory Clock 15.5Gbps GDDR6 15.5Gbps GDDR6
VRAM 8GB 8GB
TDP 250W 250W
Length 10.5-inches N/A
Width Dual Slot N/A
Cooler Type Open Air
(2x Axial Fans)
N/A
Price $699 $699

As I noted earlier, the Founders Edition cards themselves are now purely reference cards. NVIDIA isn’t doing factory overclocks this time around – the high reference clock speeds making that process a bit harder – so the RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition is very straightforward examples of what reference-clocked RTX 2080 Super cards can deliver in terms of performance. It also means that the card no longer carries a price premium, with NVIDIA selling it at $699.

Externally then, possibly the only material change is quite literally in the materials. NVIDIA has taken the 2080 reference design and given the center segment of shroud a reflective coating. This, along with the Super branding, are the only two visually distinctive changes from the RTX 2080 reference design. For better or worse, the reflective section is every bit the fingerprint magnet that you probably expect, so thankfully most people aren’t handling their video cards as much as hardware reviewers are.

In terms of cooling, this means the RTX 2080 Super gets the RTX 2080’s cooler as well. At a high level this is a dual axial open air cooler, with NVIDIA sticking to this design after first introducing it last year. The open air cooler helps NVIDIA keep their load noise levels down, though idle noise levels on all of the RTX 20 series reference cards has been mediocre, and the new Super cards are no different. The fact that this reference design isn’t a blower means that the RTX 2080 Super isn’t fully self-exhausting, relying on the computer chassis itself to help move hot air away from the card. For most builders this isn’t an issue, but if you’re building a compact system or a system with limited airflow, you’ll want to make sure your system can handle the heat from a 250W video card.

Under the hood, the RTX 2080 Super inherits the RTX 2080’s heatsink design, with a large aluminum heatsink running the full length of the card. Deeper still, the heatsink is connected to the TU104 GPU with a vapor chamber, to help move heat away from the GPU more efficiently. Overall, the amount of heat that needs to be moved has increased, thanks to the higher TDP, however as this is also the same cooler design that NVIDIA uses on the 250W RTX 2080 Ti, it's more than up to the task for a 250W RTX 2080 Super.

According to NVIDIA the PCB is the same as on the regular RTX 2080. As I need this card for further testing, I haven’t shucked it down to its PCB to take inventory of components. But as the RTX 2080 was already a "fully populated" PCB as far as VRM circuitry goes, the same will definitely be true for the RTX 2080 Super as well. I have to assume NVIDIA is just driving their VRMs a bit harder, which shouldn't be an issue given what their cooler can do. It is noteworty though that as a result, the card's maximum power target is just +12%, or 280W. So while the card has a good bit of TDP headroom at stock, there isn't much more that can be added to it. Factoring in pass-through power for the VirtualLink port, and NVIDIA is right at the limit of what they can do over the 8pin + 6pin + slot power delivery configuration.

Finally, for display I/O, the card gets the continuing NVIDIA high-end standard of 3x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.0b, and 1x VirtualLink port (DP video + USB data + 30W USB power).

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super Review The Test
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  • designgears - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    Oooh right, forgot about that.
  • Dragonstongue - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    minor speed bump I consider anything 50Mhz range, not in the hundreds quicker IMHO

    I personally feel like Nv still up to their dirty old deceitful tricks/ways and making excuses as to the why. if they were able to release as "super" this quickly for the price reduction "sort of speak" that says they very much should have done this right off the bat instead of making a song and dance about it, effectively screwing early adopters of their products (YET AGAIN) just to slap a faster version (slight less+cost so basically the same price for even faster)

    A price reduction after release, I understand, a price reduction and a faster Overclocked version 3-7mth down the line to "freshen up" absolutely, but, a bait and switch (like the "new" nintendo switch same context, shafting of early adopters, which happens all the time, but in tech world Nv/Apple/Intel were/are notorious terrible at this.

    All that being said, I wonder how fast a 2080 any version esp the Ti be WITHOUT the ray trace crap being shoved into it, i.e do "standard DX features/subfeatures that do not require proprietary hard/software"

    I would imagine the transistor budget they used for the RT cores were likely more as a direct result of them cleaning and chopping as they had since the GTX 500 generation (basically) to get the speed up and power use down.

    By them gutting and re-arrange the transistors etc they were left with a bunch they could NOT use for much of anything else (or power would go up and speed would go down type thing) so they settled on things like Gsync, all the various Nvidia "game" features (shadow play, Raytrace etc etc)

    anyways. would be cool if they did in fact offer 2 versions for each of these, 1 with and 1 without ray tracing, likely the non RT would be quite a bit faster and similar reduction in the power from not having to power extra "junk in the trunk"

    in this, AMD would do very well to not worry about all that extra crud just because someone else is, focus on speed and power everything else is "old news"

    features such as Raytracing the way they do it is a self defeating sales pitch, basically "here is a cup of water, in 1 second you lose X of that water and owe me Z more for the remaining amount, better hurry up as the next cup of water is changing it's internal design a wee bit to deliver the water in fancier ways so it will appear to be better water but in fact is less of the water you actually want as they had to make room for and price in the fancy cup design which has only ONE purpose compared to the cup itself which could just be made bigger with a smaller exit to ensure water is there forever"

  • Maxiking - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    I will tell you a story about rereleasing and effectively screwing early adopters of products.. aka AMD REBRANDEON wit their Rx200 and 300 series and then another rebrand AMD REBRANDEON RX 480, RX580 and the final nail in the coffin AMD REBRANDEON RX 590.
  • Xyler94 - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    Nvidia did this too. GTX 1060 6GB, 3GB, GTX 10603GB, but with less cuda cores, GT1030 DDR4, GT1030 GDDR5 (Which both had the same model number, GT1030).

    Even the Super's are rebranded...
  • Maxiking - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    Supers are not rebranded, different chips. But nice try. 5/7
  • Xyler94 - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    What are you smoking? They aren't different at all. Slight tweaks in the number of CUDA and RT Cores sure, but that's about it. Evidence that overclocking the 2080 gets you on par in the 2080 Super. It's literally the same architecture, minus a few CUDA cores more. Please show me technical details as to how these chips are different, or do you also believe Intel's 9th gen is vastly different than 8th gen?
  • rocky12345 - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    LMAFAO dude they are the same exact chips as the launch cards. The only difference is Nvidia has not fused off as many cuda cores this time around and in the 2080 Super's case you are finally getting the 2080 that should have been launched on release day with the full core enabled. The biggest change here is finally offering the 2060S with 8GB memory because 6GB on the older 1060 and 2060 is going to become a problem at some point.
  • tamalero - Wednesday, July 24, 2019 - link

    You sir , are an idiot. they are the same identical chips. Only difference is that they have less cut down areas (which is no surprising if they improved yields).
  • Korguz - Thursday, July 25, 2019 - link

    Xyler94/rocky12345/tamalero dont waste you time with maxiking, his hatred and bias against AMD will blind him to any thing but what he sees/types. as you can see a few messages down when he " claims " amd's video card business constantly loses money, but in actuality, its kept them alive long enough while their cpu side, wasnt doing so was as the 2 people who replied, posted.
  • rocky12345 - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    I had the R9 390x and yes it was based on the 290x but for the price I paid and the performance it gave me up until a month ago because I upgraded it was a decent product.

    So basically Nvidia just did a rebrand as well with the Super cards. Pretty much the same cards with more of the chip enabled this time around. Some could argue these Super cards are what Nvidia should have released 1 year ago and not the cut down cards they actually released with a small performance bump over the 10 series or at least not the performance bump everyone was expecting. If Nvidia would have released these Super cards at launch the only thing people would have complained about was the price gouge & even then to a lesser degree because the performance would have been a bit higher than the launch cards back then.

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