Temperatures and Fan Speeds
Gaming
The erratic nature of our Metro Last Light workload at 1920x1080 coaxes a stair-step fan speed ramp from Zotac’s Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 AMP and Nvidia’s own GeForce RTX 2080. In the end, Zotac’s card ends the test spinning about 100 RPM slower than Nvidia’s two axial fans.
At the same time, Zotac’s big 2.5-slot cooler keeps TU104 several degrees cooler through our benchmark.
FurMark
Nvidia’s Founders Edition card must work a lot harder in order to keep up with our FurMark workload, so even after 10 minutes, its fans continue creeping over 2200 RPM. Meanwhile, the Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 AMP remains under 1900 RPM.
Under full utilization, the Zotac card’s TU104 processor stays quite a bit cooler than the GPU on Nvidia’s Founders Edition board.
Interestingly, the 2080 Founders Edition that Igor tested for our launch coverage never touched 80°C. Rather, on an open test bench, it topped out around 74°C. Digging further, we discovered that the model in our lab was overvolting under FurMark, pushing power consumption as high as 280W and likely causing the elevated temperatures/fan speeds. We’re following up with Nvidia to determine why our Founders Edition sample isn’t behaving as expected.
Open Case/Closed Case
Once upon a time, we would have looked to Nvidia’s Founders Edition family for the best behavior in closed, compact cases. But because the company’s own reference design now exhausts waste heat back into your chassis, there’s no reason to favor it over third-party designs with axial fans. In fact, Zotac’s Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 AMP performs better than the Founders Edition model in our cooling tests.
Enclosing any card with axial fans in a case changes its thermal profile as the ambient environment warms up. Good circulation is critical to keep GPU temperatures and fan speeds down. We boxed our Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 AMP up in a Corsair Obsidian 750D and ran the same FurMark test with and without its side in place, comparing the card’s behavior both ways.
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