The GeForce RTX 2080 Turbo from ASUS is supposed to be a "baseline" RTX 2080 product, which the company can sell at $699, or closest to it. These boards were found to feature the TU104-400A-A1 variant of the TU104 silicon, which NVIDIA allows its add-in card (AIC) partners to ship factory-overclocked speeds with. At this point it's not known if all ASUS RTX 2080 Turbo cards feature the "A" variant TU104 chips, or if it's a lottery. Given that the ASUS RTX 2080 Turbo's PCB is largely based on NVIDIA's reference design, PC Games Hardware (PCGH) has been able to successfully flash the card's BIOS with that of the RTX 2080 Founders Edition cards based on the reference PCB, which have power-limits increased to the tune of 307 W, which facilitates not just higher GPU Boost frequencies, but also better sustainability of elevated boost clock states.

With its "Turing" family of GPUs, NVIDIA created ASIC variants along the lines of chips that board partners are allowed to factory-overclock, and those that they aren't. You can read all about that in our older article. Normally, the TU104-400-A1 silicon is intended for baseline cards such as the ASUS RTX 2080 Turbo, whereas the TU104-400A-A1 goes into factory-overclocked products such as ASUS RTX 2080 ROG Strix. The discovery of TU104-400A-A1 on the ASUS RTX 2080 Turbo makes it the cheapest option for enthusiasts wanting to flash it with BIOS of other reference-PCB based cards that have TU104-400A-A1 chips to increase power limits, and then simply pairing the card with custom liquid cooling, to manually overclock further, thanks to the increased power limits. We're not sure you can flash Founders Edition BIOS on cards that have reference-design PCBs but non-A ASICs.