Nvidia RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti Review

Test Setup

In a slight change to our regular graphing, today we’ll be sorting our graphs by the 4K result. These two cards are very much the flagship nVidia products, and so seeing how they perform at 1080P, when lots of cards already have plentiful performance there, would be pointless. Nobody is spending the thick end of a grand of a GPU to run it on a 15″ monitor, and if you are, you have more problems than the way we sort our graphs.

nVidia RTX 2080
nVidia RTX 2080Ti
Intel i7 6850K
ASUS X99 Strix
Corsair ROG Dominator Platinum 3200
Corsair RM1000i
Corsair LX 512GB OS
Corsair LS 480GB x2 Raid0 Games
Corsair H100i V2
Windows 10

Overclocking

Average boost clocks are more realistic than absolute peak numbers, but we know that a lot of people care very much about the top end maximum, so before we show you the averages on the next page, let’s have a quick look at the peak speeds. Note that this is utilising the EVGA Precision tool to pimp the power consumption and free up some overhead for manual overclocking. The nVidia OC Scanner finds the high point with a degree of automation, but for now we’re sticking with manually fettling it ourselves to obtain the best possible result.

RTX 2080

With slightly less hardware on the PCB than the 2080Ti, the RTX 2080 really has a lot of headroom available to overclockers, even in this Founders Edition. The days of the nVidia reference model existing solely to form a foundation for third party cards is well behind us, as these are a genuine alternative to the models from manufacturers who supply your motherboard. We squeezed well over 250 MHz extra from the TU104 GPU and the temperature remained resolutely under the 80°C mark that always starts to raise our eyebrows. 

  

RTX 2080Ti

The RTX 2080Ti has much more hardware on the PCB when compared to the RTX 2080, and this naturally has a small effect on the overclocking capabilities of the card. Think of it as the difference between Xeon and Core i7, or Threadripper and Ryzen 7. If you stuff a lot of extra cores on the PCB it will generate more heat and require more power, thus the absolute clock speed limit might be lower, although this is negated by the increase in hardware. One thing is for sure, the cooler design and granular overclocking options let us push the GPU significantly without overheating everything.