ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2080 TI OC
Kicking maximum 4K butt
THE BELLIGERENT TIRADES against Nvidia’s mad marketing ploys have to end. The company’s been plagued with everything from increased failure rates to a torrent of abuse from journos. And with good reason. The insane price jump and repositioning of the brand, in conjunction with a lack of a significant performance increase, was a bitter pill to swallow, all in the name of ray tracing and DLSS antialiasing, which we’ve still yet to see.
But we can only rail against the company for so long. Despite it all, Nvidia is still very much king of the hill when it comes to graphical performance. There is no competition at the high end at all. Vega is a flop in comparison to the GTX 1080. And this? This card is pure power.
Let’s forget about the price for a minute, and take a look at the pure performance numbers across our test suite. Average frame rates at 4K:
Shadow of War, 74fps; War hammer II, 58fps; Rise of the Tomb Raider, 87fps; Ghost Recon Wildlands, 48fps. Those are some serious numbers to push at the super-high-end. Arguably, for the first time ever, that sweet spot has been hit. There’s no compromise here at all.
If you want to game at 4K (and trust us, you do), this card will happily take any AAA title you can throw at it, and pump out an incredibly enjoyable, supersmooth experience, no sweat. And that in itself is s pretty dishy. Asus’s Strix RTX OC variant t also comes packing a ridiculously oversized zed triple-slot cooler (or 2.7-slot, according ding to Asus). A real beast of a thing, and absolutely worth the extra cash. It’s unbelievably quiet, quiet even under load. This is thanks to a combination of intelligent fan design (called Axial fan tech), a stupendous six heatpipes in total, and a truck-load of fins. None of the RTX cards we’ve seen so far have been small affairs, but this one takes the cake.
That $1,350 price point, though— oof, that’s a biggy. However, our grudge stems less from the cost, and more from what the card (or the GPU in this case) is called. Typically, when a new series of Nvidia cards is launched, it follows an almost identical pattern. The first month we see a GTX X80 launch, followed quickly by an X70, then a Titan of some description. The X80 is usually $600–700 or so, the X70 $400–500, and the Titan comes in at an expected $1,000–1,200 price point. About 10 months later, a big one drops, usually in response to AMD— the X80 Ti. This is usually a cut-down variant of the Titan we saw at launch, but with a touch less memory, some of the features turned off, and a better binned chip. Yet what’s most important about its launch is that it usually arrives at the same price as the X80 originally retailed for, shuffling the market down by $100–200 $100 200 a go. go This makes the entire range more competitive, and even better value. However, with the 2080 Ti arriving on launch at the price of a Titan, the likelihood of us seeing that happen this generation is slim to none.
On the whole, Asus’s RTX 2080 Ti OC is a fantastic card. Its incredible performance at 4K makes it the true king of the resolution, and brings down that 60fps 4K Ultra barrier. The card looks good despite its girth, the RGB isn’t too intimidating, and thanks to aiming for that 75 C temperature mark, the fans are excessively quiet. We just wish the price was lower. A lot lower.