ASUS GeForce RTX 2080 Super Dual EVO OC review (Page 24)

ASUS GeForce RTX 2080 Super Dual EVO OC review

Graphics cards 1054 Page 24 of 24 Published 2019-07-28 12:06 by Hilbert Hagedoorn

Conclusion

Final words and verdict

ASUS has a bit of a confusing card with thus RTX 2080S Dual EVO OC, that OC equals to a factory tweak of a whopping 15 MHz over the reference (out of the box). How can you call that an OC?. It's almost a bit shameful to mark on the box really. The card can do 1860 MHz, but that requires your ASUS Software to be ON all the time. So really, that makes this overall a close to reference card performing product. The thermals are average, the cooling albeit silent enough isn't winning prices either. The PCB used isn't custom either as it is the reference board with an ASUS cooler smacked on top of it. All that is fine really, if it would be priced close to the founder's card as well. And that is just not the case, in the entire EU the lowest price I could find was € 810,- the cheapest card from another brand sits around € 725,- which is way more spot-on as to what this card needs to be priced at. Don't get me wrong as the product itself is totally fine, as long as it was priced at a reference level of € 749,- (similar prices in USD). This is not a premium card, so why is it priced like that?

Aesthetics

With a dark design, the cooler once powered on just looks fine really. At the top, there is a bit of RGB lighting effects are funky to see. That LED inclusion that has been done subtly. While I always will remain skeptical about backplates (they potentially can trap heat and thus warm up the PCB) ASUS does have vents there. The flip-side is that they can look better and can protect your PCB and components from damage and, well, they can look nice as they can have a certain aesthetic appeal. I have to admit, this is looking very nice but looks are always personal, of course. So in the end, on looks, you certainly get that premium feel of detailed aesthetics and quality.

Cooling & Noise Levels

The card tops out at roughly 74 Degrees C while gaming. So that's not bad but it certainly ain't good either, the acoustics I'd rate as silent enough, but here again, it was a more noisier product we have tested. We've heard no noticeable coil whine. But I do want to note that any graphics card at a high-enough FPS can make some coil-whine.

Overclocking

Anything and everything is regulated by NVIDIA these days. Speaking, in general, you can expect another 8% of extra perf out of the card when you bump up the graphics memory and GPU a bit. That is, however, paired with an increased board power limiter and, as such, that will cost a bit more energy. Both traditional overclocking, as well as the OC Scanner functions, bring us close to that value. In retrospect though, you have to remember, that the 'older' RTX models could also be tweaked to 15~16 Gbps on that GDDR6 Micron memory. The new 2080 Super models have Samsung GDDR6 and it certainly is faster overall as well as tweaking. We could even hit 18 GHz, however, that was not stable. So we settled at 17.5 GHz (effective data-rate) and that is crazy fast.

Conclusion: Super expensive?

As stated, we're a little confused with the RTX 2080 Super Dual Evo OC - It has a reference PCB and a custom cooler. That's it. So there are no double eight-pin power connectors (the dual has to do with 'only' 6 + 8-pins) extra fans and there is no massive out of the box tweak applied either. That means the RTX 2080S in this revision should be positioned at 699 USD / 749 EUR, and really should not be much higher in retail. Unfortunately, it easy passes 850 Euros which is silly. Overall it's close to reference perf offering product, you get to play around with RTX/DLSS if you desire. While we can still argue DLSS and RTX you do need to realize that the industry is at a clipping point, hardware-based ray tracing is coming, whether that is NVIDIA, AMD or Intel. You probably still are paying a price premium to be that early adopter with a handful of games to actually test it on. But you can't blame NVIDIA for pioneering with technology. The out of the box factory tweak is so small that I won't even name it a tweak, I mean 15 MHz, come on. Tweaking wise the card did not disappoint. The 2080 Super is plenty fast for any gaming up-to Ultra HD based on shading performance. With Raytracing enabled you'll be in the 1080p or 1440p range. The good news is that the card is TU104 based, and that means it is fitted with an NVlink slot, yep you could pair up two of these and go for SLI. However, given its track history, Multi-GPU is dying. As stated, the factory tweak is pretty weak, the cooling performance average at best and the same can be said about the noise levels. If priced right it would have gotten an award as really it ain't a bad product at all. But at prices ranging from € 810,- to € 869,- as listed right now, you are way better off with a cheaper brand or founders edition RTX 2080 Super at 699 USD / € 749,00 in the EU.