GAMER’S DELIGHT
THERE WERE NO NASTY surprises putting this machine together, other than the final price—although we feared this was always going to be the case with Nvidia’s latest and greatest GPU. You could easily spend a whole lot more, and the core performance wouldn’t change too much, while spending less could well throw a monkey wrench in the works. This isn’t a budget build by any stretch, but it is probably the most affordable way of building an RTX 2080 Ti machine that isn’t held back by the processor or storage.
The trickiest part of the build involved the cooler, and we could have mitigated this by installing the bracket outside of the case, simply because holding the backplate in place would have been easier (and wouldn’t have required quite so many hands). We could have gone for a 360mm radiator in the front as well, which would have improved airflow further, although we didn’t have a problem with heat in this machine anyway. The fact that you can control the lighting of the cooler using the tiny remote was a bit of a bonus, though, and it can look pretty if you care about such things.
The goal of this build was to piece together a cutting-edge gaming machine that will survive the ravages of time, and give the RTX 2080 Ti the best possible future. We feel we hit this brief pretty convincingly, and the benchmarks would seem to back that up, with some impressive results when compared to our zero-point machine. The
Total War: WarhammerII result, which rolled in 120 percent better than our zeropoint, shows the kind of improvement that is possible with this new graphics card, although this is over the older GTX 1080.
At this point, we’re still not sure how the RTX 2080 Ti performs in real-time raytracing titles or DLSS, but we’ll revisit the performance at these tasks in a future issue, possibly with this build (if we haven’t stripped it down by then). For now, this certainly makes for a smooth gaming experience, and returning to a normal gaming machine after using this on a 4K screen makes for an uncomfortable experience.
We like to ask ourselves what we’d change at the end of every build. Here, we’re not sure that anything stands out. The case is a delight to work in, and looks great when all the cabling is tucked out of sight. We are tempted to try mounting the graphics card vertically, and this could be the chassis that pushes us over the edge to try it, especially if we use a graphics card that lights up as much as the rest of this system.