Nvidia RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti Review

NV OC Scanner  

A lot has changed since Pascal, Nvidia’s Founders Edition graphics cards can no longer be considered as “premium reference” offerings, delivering baseline performance and loud blower-style coolers. 

With Turing, Nvidia has challenged their AIB partners by moving past their reference specifications, offering their Founders Edition models with factory overclocks and a cooling system with dual axial fans. Nvidia’s AIB partners can now ship graphics hardware that offers less performance than Founders Edition models. 

Nvidia maintains the standard dual-slot form factor of their Founders Edition offerings by introducing the world’s largest vapour chamber GPU cooler that the industry has ever seen, allowing Nvidia’s RTX 20 series Founders Edition cards to run both cool and quiet, which again challenges their AIB partners to manufacture better custom options. 
 

  

When compared to Nvidia’s 10-series models, Nvidia’s RTX 20-series Founders Edition models run at lower temperatures and with reduced fan noise, making their latest Founders Edition models both cooler running and quieter when inside gaming systems. This is despite the increase silicon/die sizes that are offered by Turing, making this thermal feat all the more impressive. 

  

Nvidia has stated that their RTX Founders Edition graphics cards are “Built to Overclock”, with Nvidia offering increased performance headroom thanks to the cleaner power delivery that is available with Turing. This is combined with the ability of the user to fully control how much power is available to the card and where to draw the thermal line, which hopefully will bring benefits not only in the OC Scanner – the modified GPU Boost – but also in manual overclocking scenarios.

Turing can now access higher power levels with less variability, allowing the architecture to make better use of increased power limits. Sadly, Nvidia has not given us a ballpark figure for Turing’s overclocking potential, but now they are in our sweaty mitts we can find out for ourselves if these tweaks have been beneficial.

  

Last, but by no means least, we have Nvidia’s new OC Scanner utility, which is designed to quickly overclock and test Turing graphics cards to offer increased performance levels with minimal hassle. 

Nvidia has told us that this utility takes around 20 minutes to run and will automatically overclock your Turing-powered graphics card. Nvidia has already given this software to their AIB partners for integration into their individual overclocking utilities, including MSI Afterburner, EVGA Precision X1 and ASUS GPU Tweak. We will see how this tool compared with manual overclocking in our full review.