Palit GeForce RTX 2080 Gamerock Premium review - Introduction

Palit GeForce RTX 2080 Gamerock Premium 8G review

We welcome Palit in our house again, this round with their latest RTX offering, the GeForce RTX 2080 8G Gamerock Premium to be precise. Known for their more value offering this graphics card does not disappoint when it comes towards cooling and acoustics, not at all. Join us for a review.

We've already covered a lot of new technology as the Turing architecture of the new GPUs offers a fundamental 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 into the new GPUs, and these are active. Is Turing the start of the next 20 years of gaming graphics? Well, that all depends on the actual adoption rate in the software houses, with the guys and girls that develop games. A dozen or so RTX games are in development and a dozen or so announced titles will make use of deep learning DLSS 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. Starting November 20th of the year 2018 you will see two products become available, a GeForce RTX 2070 will follow later in October. The GeForce RTX 2080 then; this graphics card series will not have the full shader count and GPU as the 2080 Ti, in fact, it even has its own GPU called the TU104. This card will get 2944 shader processors (also referred to as Stream or Cuda cores) active based on that TU104 GPU running a base clock of 1515 MHz with Boost frequencies running upwards to 1800 MHz. The TU104 chip contains six GPCs, 48 SMs, and eight 32-bit memory controllers (256-bit total). Each SM includes 64 shader processors, 256 KB register file, 96 KB L1 data cache/shared memory cache, and four texture units. The full TU104 chip contains 13.6 Billion transistors and includes 3072 shader processors, 368 Tensor Cores, and 48 RT Cores. So yes, the RTX 2080 is cut down. One x8 NVLink link is activated providing 25 GB/sec of bandwidth in each direction (50 GB/sec total bandwidth). Keep in mind that the clocks and TDPs will be different here and there, AIB partners obviously have different factory tweaked products. The GDDR6 memory will get tied to a 256-bit bus, and depending on the clock frequency, we are looking at 448 GB/sec. It is a product that will start at 699 USD for the AIB partner products, and 799 for the Founders editions. This product will have a 225 Watt TDP. Will the 2080 rip a hole on that FPS ceiling? Well, let's find out and also show you a trick or two on Raytracing and DLSS, of course.

Palit is back in the graphics card arena with several models (SKUs) for both the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti. You will notice the GamingPro (OC), the Jetstream and Super Jetstream and the Gamerock and Gamerock Premium edition. The latter one is up for testing today. The Pro and premium models have slightly higher boost frequencies. Our Premium model as such has a turbo allowance of 1875 MHz coming from 1800 MHz for the founder cards. The GDDR6 memory has been not been tweaked, the new Micron ICs are a stock 14 GHz (effective clock-rate). The Gamerock Premium has been fitted with that Turing TU104 based GPU and was housed onto a custom PCB design. The board is fed by two 8-pin power connectors and is delivered with a dual BIOS. The 2.7 slots dual fan based cooler is pretty spectacular really as it is very silent and effective hovering at a 65 Degrees C load temperature. We have a thing or two to show you alright, let's commence this review, shall we?