EVGA's GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Kingpin Card Includes a Power Meter

EVGA had several interesting products to show at this CES 2019, including a new high-end sound card, three RTX 2060 graphics cards, a new motherboard and the top-of-the-line GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Kingpin, which packs in some really nice features.

The Kingpin 2080 Ti utilizes a hybrid AIO closed loop cooling design, similar to its hybrid cards in the past. This is mostly thanks to the PCB featuring an incredible 19-phase VRM, fed with power thanks to three 6+2 pin PCIe connectors. Besides the water-cooled block, there's also a 100mm fan, developed specifically to cool the heatsinks coming into contact with the memory chips, and the DC-DC converters. The 120mm radiator ensures that temps will be kept low, even under tough conditions and higher overclocks. EVGA's also included diagnostic LEDs, voltage measurement points, a V-BIOS selector switch, and headers where you can connect your EVBot devices.

The most interesting feature of this card, which will be available on other EVGA products as well, is the LCD screen on the top of the GPU which, besides displaying temperature and the pump and fan's rotation speeds, also provides voltage and power consumption information as well. Yes that's right, this is the first graphics card providing actual wattage information, something that hard-core overclockers will appreciate. There's will even be software that provides all the measurements and readings direct to your desktop, but it isn't ready just yet, so EVGA didn't show it.

So far, getting power consumption information from GPUs is a hard task requiring very specialized and expensive equipment. The Powenetics system is currently one of the most affordable and accurate ways to get this kind of information. But it still requires some skill in electronics in order to be installed. Hopefully, we will soon have an EVGA graphics card with this monitoring system so we will be able to compare the power measurements that it provides with the ones of the Powenetics system. For the record, EVGA's monitoring system can provide up to ten measurements per second, which is more than fast enough for a commercial product, and it uses shunt resistors to get power consumption and voltage information too.

EVGA didn't provide us with a price tag for this product, but we expect it to demand some serious cash given its performance and extra features. It would be nice though if a larger radiator was used, for more overclocking headroom and even lower temperatures. After all, this is a graphics card that's aimed at serious overclockers, not at mainstream users.

Disclaimer: Aris Mpitziopoulos is Tom's Hardware's PSU reviewer. He is also the Chief Testing Engineer of Cybenetics, and developed the Cybenetics certification methodologies apart from his role on Tom's Hardware. Neither Tom's Hardware nor its parent company, Future PLC, are financially involved with Cybenetics. Aris does not perform the actual certifications for Cybenetics.

Aris Mpitziopoulos
Contributing Editor

Aris Mpitziopoulos is a contributing editor at Tom's Hardware, covering PSUs.

  • hardcore_player
    Sound Cards are literary dead , I see no reason for anyone even enthusiasts to buy one , unless your build in sound card is damaged or your pc is from the mid 90s .
    Reply
  • hendrickhere
    Professional audio and recording projects could benefit. I'm sure an audiophile would find an advanced card useful.
    Reply
  • faalin
    Ill take my Creative SB ZxR sound card over onboard anyday
    Reply
  • dimar
    I can't even imagine my build not having a high end sound card. I'll continue getting sound cards until the onboard ones become as good as high end ones. Though, when I do a build for other people, the onboard audio is good enough 90% of the time.
    Reply
  • jtcmedia
    Ha! Sounds so much like the argument I had with a guy who said 4K is dead because of 8K.
    Reply
  • wifiburger
    2080ti kingpin hybrid looks like complete trash ! they could of taken their full water block 2080ti and design an AIO around that !
    I could care less about a GPU only water block when VRMs + RAM run at 80c+ and dump tons of heat in the case
    Reply