Asus GeForce RTX 2080 Ti RoG Strix review - Introduction

ASUS GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11GB RoG Strix quick review
The new h00t of a flagship in da house

Meet the ASUS GeForce RTX 2080 Ti RoG Strix, yes, the STRIX is back with that familiar triple fan look. We review and test the Republic Of Gamers card from ASUS which comes all custom cooled and a revamped custom PCB design. We've already covered a lot of new technology as the Turing architecture of the new GPUs offers a fundament change in the graphics card arena as next to your normal shading engine, NVIDIA has added RT (Raytracing) cores, as well as Tensor (AI), cores onto the new GPUs, and these are active. Is Turing is the start of the next 20 years of gaming graphics? Well, that all depends on the actual adoption rate in the software houses, they guys and girls that develop games and a dozen or so RTX games are in development and a dozen or so announced titles will make use of deep learning DLSS running utilizing the Tensor cores. For the new RTX series, it's mostly about Raytracing though. So welcome to a long row of RTX reviews. We start off with the reference cards and will follow with the AIB cards as for whatever reason NVIDIA figured it to be an okay thing for them to launch everything at once. First a quick recap of what's tested in this article, a bit of architecture and then we'll dive into real-world testing of course. You better grab a drink as these reference articles are prone to be lengthy with all the information we are covering. 

The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti - this is the new consumer flagship graphics card from NVIDIA is the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, this product series has been fitted with the TU102 GPU. This GPU will have 4352 active shader processors, which is substantial when compared with the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. The product will get 11GB GDDR6 graphics memory, and with that 11 GB you will get a 352-bit wide memory bus. The GPU has six Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs), 36 Texture Processing Clusters (TPCs), and 72 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs). Each SM contains 64 CUDA Cores, eight Tensor Cores, four texture units, and 96 KB of L1/shared memory which can be configured for various capacities depending on the compute or graphics workloads. Ray tracing acceleration is performed by a new RT Core processing, the TU102 has 72 of them with 576 tensor cores and 96 ROP units. For clock frequencies, we're looking at a 1350 MHz base frequency, with Turbo allowance towards 1635 MHz. Keep some margin in mind for the board partner clock frequencies. The AIB products should start at 999 USD, the founders' edition will start at 1199 USD.

For this review we will look into the ASUS GeForce RTX 2080 Ti RoG Strix, now before we dive into the photo shoot a note, we had a merely hours hands-on time with the product, so this is a preliminary review. We hope to update this review next week or two with a full test suite as there simply wasn't any time with NVIDIA's driver supplied really late. The Strix is a card under the ROG branding these days. A product that has been designed all custom with a massive cooler, higher clock speeds and a back-plate with a configurable RGB LED lit ROG logo. The board is fed by two 8-pin power connectors and shows a surprise or two. One is a silent mode, operating at slightly higher temps while giving the same performance as 'performance' mode switch. The GPU is clocked at a nice 1350 MHz with a 1650 MHz boost as default clocks, that is only 15 MHz over the founders design and as such both cards should be pretty much on par when it comes to performance. The GDDR6 memory has been not been tweaked, the new Micron ICs are a stock 14 GHz (effective clock-rate).

The STRIX edition has a 2.7 (read: triple) slot design with a triple-fan cooling solution. Embedded as well is some funky LED lighting system, everything about this product states 'premium' really. And yeah, we have enough to talk about and to show. Have a peek below and then dive into this initial review.