Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition Review: Faster, More Expensive Than GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

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Nvidia’s Thermal Solution, In Depth

Nvidia's Founders Edition card employs two 8.5cm axial fans with 13 blades each in its effort to move heat away from TU104 as quickly and evenly as possible. The forged aluminum shroud cannot be completely disassembled without the use of force (or a special tool we don't have—force is looking like the better option at this point).

Although it looks less imposing than previous-generation Founders Edition cards, GeForce RTX 2080's thermal solution is quite massive. Without thermal pads, our laboratory scale says it weighs 935g.

The following image shows the bottom of Nvidia's vapor chamber with the backplate and PCB removed. Nvidia says the fin stack is soldered to the vapor chamber, so it'd be difficult to separate the two pieces.

The base of GeForce RTX 2080’s mounting plate differs from what we found on the RTX 2080 Ti, since both cards employ dissimilar layouts. This explains their slight weight variance. Everything else, from the vapor chamber to the cooling fins to the fans, is identical.

GeForce RTX 2080’s backplate layout is unique as well. Most obvious is that Nvidia places thermal pads in different locations corresponding to components up top on the PCB.

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Cooling Subsystem, At a Glance
Cooler TypeAir cooler
GPU CoolingVapor chamber
Cooling FinsAluminum, oriented vertically
VRM CoolingVia mounting frame
RAM CoolingVia mounting frame
Fans2x 8.5cm axial fans, 13 blades eachNo semi-passive mode
BackplateYes, helps with cooling

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Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.
91 Comments Comment from the forums
  • wh3resmycar
    failure, this is a failure.

    this gtx20 series looks like it won't be worth it.
    Reply
  • velocityg4
    What? No “just buy it” in your conclusion.

    Considering Founders edition usually starts about $100 more that standard edition. Plus, it is new to market. If a 2080 can be had for $100 more than a 1080 Ti. The price is as expected.
    Reply
  • tojumikie
    another price-panicked pundit
    Reply
  • Krazie_Ivan
    2080 should have been the 2070, as it barely beats a 1080ti and is the TU104 die. and given the 30mo since Pascal launch, we should almost be looking at 3000 series benches. combine those two with the insane pricing, and Turing/RTX is a huge disappointment. DLSS could be nice and i'm glad Nvidia is pushing for RT development, but there's not enough positives here to justify the costs. $380 2080 / $500 2080ti (and relabel them to match their die codes, like Keplar-Pascal)... otherwise, no thx.
    Reply
  • chaosmassive
    thank you for your thorough review on these cards,
    finally the card has been demystified and indeed for the price is it not worth the buy considering 1080 ti in such a low price..

    turned out I dont need ray tracing in my life before I die.
    Reply
  • shrapnel_indie
    After seeing the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti serve up respectable performance in Battlefield V at 1920x1080 with ray tracing enabled,
    Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for another day to measure RTX 2080’s alacrity in ray-traced games. There simply aren’t any available yet.

    Odd... either ray tracing graphics games are available or they're not. You can't test what isn't available for testing... and RT for BF5, last I heard was a zero-day patch... (or was it the modifications to RT that was supposed to improve FPS to acceptable levels.)
    Reply
  • cangelini
    21333311 said:
    After seeing the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti serve up respectable performance in Battlefield V at 1920x1080 with ray tracing enabled,
    Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for another day to measure RTX 2080’s alacrity in ray-traced games. There simply aren’t any available yet.

    Odd... either ray tracing graphics games are available or they're not. You can't test what isn't available for testing... and RT for BF5, last I heard was a zero-day patch... (or was it the modifications to RT that was supposed to improve FPS to acceptable levels.)

    They're not available, but we've seen Battlefield 5 in action with ray tracing enabled ;)
    Reply
  • WINTERLORD
    wait a minute the 2080 has only one RT core and the 2080 has 72 RT cores? I think there may be an error in the review. update spoke to soon i think that means 1rt cluster...

    first page says " TU104 is constructed with the same building blocks as TU102; it just features fewer of them. Streaming Multiprocessors still sport 64 CUDA cores, eight Tensor cores, one RT core, four texture units, 16 load/store units, 256KB of register space, and 96KB of L1 cache/shared memory. "
    Reply
  • jimmysmitty
    21333069 said:
    failure, this is a failure.

    this gtx20 series looks like it won't be worth it.

    I think sales will determine that and if history is anything without stiff competition from AMD I am sure they will sell just fine especially once the AiB cards come out.

    21333082 said:
    What? No “just buy it” in your conclusion.

    Considering Founders edition usually starts about $100 more that standard edition. Plus, it is new to market. If a 2080 can be had for $100 more than a 1080 Ti. The price is as expected.

    Chris has never been like that.

    That said, the pricing should be decent for AiB after a few months. When they launch they get price gouged. Still I would have loved a GTX 1080 price number. That GPU outperformed the 980 Ti by a good margin and was cheaper at launch.

    Maybe AMD will come out with something sometime soon. Otherwise we wont see pricing drop. That or AMD will take advantage of the pricing increase and up theirs too.
    Reply
  • hixbot
    Such a shame 2.5 years after pascal launches, performance per dollar does not improve.
    Reply