It’s true; some AIB Geforce RTX 2080 GPUs will be slower than Nvidia’s Founders Edition

With the release of their RTX 20 series of Turing graphics cards, Nvidia has challenged their AIB partners by releasing Founders Edition graphics cards with factory overclocks.  

This change places Nvidia’s Founders Edition offerings above the company’s reference specifications for the first time, allowing AIB manufacturers to release custom RTX series graphics cards with lower clock speeds than Nvidia’s home-grown models. For the first time, custom Nvidia graphics cards could offer less performance than Nvidia’s Founders Edition variants. 

Zotac has officially confirmed the specifications of their Gaming RTX 2080 Blower graphics card, adhering to Nvidia’s reference specifications with a boost clock speed of 1710MHz while using a blower-style cooler. By sticking to Nvidia’s reference design, Zotac has created an RTX 2080 that offers a boost clock speed that is 90MHz lower than Nvidia’s Founders Edition, which in conjunction with it’s blower-style cooler will supply decreased performance, higher thermals under load and will likely run a lot louder than Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Founders Edition.