New PC Hardware Review – The Nvidia RTX 2080

Nvidia RTX 2080 reviewIf there is one piece of hardware everyone has been expecting for some time now, it’s the Nvidia RTX 2080, and it’s finally here. The graphics card is finally opening a door for many people out there to experience new graphics in a way that only high-end gamers were able to.  The GPU is a 20-series mainstream component that lacks a budget-conscious price tag, but it packs quite a punch since it retains the special silicon that allows entry into ray-traced grounds with no problems. It’s also an open GTU that has the ability to work with older components.

It can process six Giga Rays per second of RT Core. Most of the performance resides in the Turing GPU while scraping minimum rated specs for real-time ray tracing. There are still very few games out there capable of challenging this new GPU, but this certainly hasn’t stopped Nvidia from pursuing a big marketing strategy and the announce of third parties embracing the specs of the RTX 2080 to make it attractive to the market in the short run. The official announcement was released in the CES 2019 convention held in Las Vegas.

Specs – What we know so far

Make no mistake; this brand new GPU is undoubtedly a work of art by itself. Before the RTX 2080 came along, very few components managed to pull off the five billion rays per second to achieve entry-level ray tracing. To hit those numbers gamers had to blow at least four figures in state of the art technology. Nvidia just changed all that by offering a GPU capable of retaining 30 SMs worth of ray trace silicon in a full-fat TU106 GPU. If we take the word of Nvidia on these numbers, it means that it can handle 1,920 CUAD Cores, 30 RT-Cores, and 240 Tensor Cores. If you compare this performance with past achievements, the company has managed to create a GPU that can show off better graphics at increased 50% increased better quality than the old GTX 1060.

The power of the silky silicon components is stored in a 445mm2 GPU that is kept cool very noticeable twin axial shroud cooler. This fan cooler is the same one used in most of the 20-series First Edition cards. If there was some room from improvement from previous designs, making the GPU slicker certainly could have helped. This is the first 20-series graphics card that comes with no pre-overclock from the factory. Most of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX cards come with it, so it certainly feels like a fresh change of pace for customizers and builders. The card has been tested with a 1,680MHz GPU boost clock that works perfectly fine for the TU106 GPU inside. So far the lowest combination that has run the card properly is a build featuring 6GB of GDDR6 delivering 14Gbps with an aggregate 192bit bus. The resulting 336GB per sec bandwidth is enough to keep that GPU running at full power.

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Final Thoughts

The RTX 2080 is not a budget GPU by any means, but there is nothing quite like it in the market either. At $350 a unit, you certainly expect a lot out of it, and you will probably get it if you have the right parts to go with it. Nvidia has certainly taken one step forward in the graphics department by offering state of the art tech at prices that doesn’t hurt the wallet. It doesn’t help much that the company is competing with itself by releasing a similar model of a product they still have in stock such as it happens with the Nvidia GTX 1070 Ti that was launched back in the day priced at $460. If you are wondering if the RTX 2080 has good value, the answer is “yes.” Graphics enthusiasts will surely feel delighted at the sharpness of most images coming out of their screens. The only issue right now is that only designers and renderers can get the most out of it. Gamers will need to have a little more patience as more developers make their games compatible with it.