Introduction

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080 Super was launched as part of the company's two-phase Turing "Super" launch across July. Designed to displace the RTX 2080 from the company's product stack at $700, the RTX 2080 Super not just maxes out the 12 nm "TU104" Turing silicon, but also comes with higher GPU clock speeds and faster 15.5 Gbps GDDR6 memory. NVIDIA's launch of the RTX 2080 Super may have been necessitated by, of all things, the $399 Radeon RX 5700 XT.

AMD's Radeon RX 5700-series "Navi" launch destabilized NVIDIA's lineup. The RX 5700 XT outperforms the RTX 2070, and the RX 5700 beats the RTX 2060, which forced NVIDIA to launch the RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super to recapture the $399 and $499 price points. This had a ripple effect on the RTX 2080 because the RTX 2070 Super is carved out from the same "TU104" silicon, and the original RTX 2070 maxes out the "TU106". The RTX 2070 Super performs within 6-8 percent of the RTX 2080 while being $200 cheaper. Custom-design, factory-overclocked RTX 2070 Super cards narrow the performance gap to as little as 3-4 percent. NVIDIA hence had to refresh the RTX 2080 lest it gets cannibalized by the RTX 2070 Super. We thus have the new RTX 2080 Super.



NVIDIA's objectives with the RTX 2080 Super are to increase the performance gap with the RTX 2070 Super, so it can justify selling it at a $200 premium, at $700 and avoid tapping into the larger "TU102" silicon, which would increase costs. The company's approach hence is to supercharge the "TU104". For starters, all 3,072 CUDA cores physically present on the chip are enabled. The original RTX 2080 only features 2,944 of them. Secondly, the GPU Boost frequency is dialed up by a further 100 MHz, to 1815 MHz (up 6 percent). Lastly, the company increased the memory bandwidth by 11 percent by dialing memory clock speeds up to 15.5 Gbps using fast 16 Gbps-rated memory chips.

In this review, we have with us the EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 Super Black, which is the company's entry-level model for the RTX 2080 Super lineup. The card comes at clock speeds matching the NVIDIA Founders Edition, with identical power limits. The Founders Edition cooler has been replaced by an EVGA dual-slot, dual-fan design which features idle fan stop. A backplate is not available on the RTX 2080 Super Black, which currently retails at the same $700 the Founders Edition is going for.