Power Tests
For our power testing, we used AIDA64 to stress the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super, then HWiNFO to monitor power use and temperatures.
After the stress test has ramped up the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super, we see it tops out at 250 watts under full load and 14Watts at idle. From a power point of view, this is very close to the Zotac GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Twin Fan we reviewed.
Cooling Performance
A key reason that we started this series was to answer the cooling question. Blower-style coolers have different capabilities than some of the large dual and triple fan gaming cards. In the case of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super which uses dual fans that exhaust hot air out the back.
Temperatures for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super run in a temperature range equal to other cards in this class. Going back to our original objective, we can see the RTX 2070 blower perform close to the RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition card. NVIDIA said it made the cooling change to facilitate better cooling, and this is an example of that in action.
Final Words
With improvements in clock speeds we see the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super reach results above the outgoing RTX 2080 but not quite to RTX 2080 Ti levels. With the RTX 2080 Ti coming down in price since launch, the delta is a few hundred dollars to get more memory and more compute on a card. If you were buying these cards for gaming, that may be a tough sell. For professional users who are buying these cards to get work done, the delta is fairly easy to offset with increased performance and productivity.
This is a tough call, do you need the extra memory the RTX 2080 Ti includes with its 11GB, or save ~$400 for the RTX 2080 Super with only 8GB. With that said, one can build a very impressive workstation with two RTX 2080 Super GPUs at only a few hundred more than a single RTX 2080 Ti.
After working through all the new NVIDIA Super cards we find the performance increases are welcome. The lower-tier cards such as the RTX 2060 Super offer fantastic value. As we worked our way up the Super SKU list we found one thing lacking: additional RAM. For us here, at STH we would want as much memory as we can get for deep learning and rendering tasks and that falls to the RTX 2080 TI and higher cards. However, the jump in price to the RTX 2080 Ti leaves the RTX 2080 Super at a very good price/performance point and two for SLI would be better. This is certainly a case where you now need to think seriously about the price/ performance ladder from a single GeForce RTX 2080 Super to a RTX 2080 Ti to two RTX 2080 Super cards.
Since the Quadro P6000 was placed on some of the performance graphs, it would have been nice to see how the RTX 2080 Super compares against the Quadro RTX5000.
GeForce RTX 2080 Super is a fucking gpu for deep learning! I really don’t recommend it!
The GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER is a pretty good gaming GPU. However, due to the supply and demand on this card, the prices are sky rocketing. You could probably find a 3070 for the same price, if not less. If you can manage to find a good deal on one, and not on any 30 series product, pull the trigger on it. In my opinion, this is a great card, but you could find better.