NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Graphics Card Review

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition Power Consumption

For our power testing, we used AIDA64 to stress the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, then HWiNFO to monitor power use and temperatures.

Power consumption is at the higher-end of the spectrum, but along the same lines as our AIB partner GeForce GTX 1080 Ti card. Realistically, the differences in power are not enough to notice and are easily forgiven in the context of an enormous jump in performance.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition 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 enormous dual and triple fan gaming cards.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition is a dual fan styler cooler rather than a blower style cooler. As a more power hungry card, this gives us an opportunity to look at blower v. dual fan cooling impact.

Falling in the middle of the test samples the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti runs cooler with the dual fan cooling solution. We ramped the fan speeds to the maximum which results in fairly loud noise, not as loud as the blower cards but none the less its something you would not want to do all the time for those that require a silent machine. Keeping the fans at Auto works very well and we recommend running that card at that setting.

Final Words

In the past several reviews we have taken a look at blower graphics cards which work great for servers and even workstations. The benchmark results for these cards blew us away compared to Pascal generation GPUs in our benchmarks. Workstation users could always use more power and better cooling solutions for the workloads they use and environments in which they work. Enter the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE, which single-handedly dominated every benchmark we ran, and did so at a better power efficiency level and ran cooler.

The card itself is beautiful, reminding us of a top end supercar, complete metal construction gives the RTX 2080 Ti FE a high-quality feel, but does add weight, this card is the most massive GPU we have used to date, be sure to mount this GPU in your case securely.

Applications that use CUDA and even OpenCL should see excellent results and faster run times after looking at our benchmarks. This alone can justify the price of the card, at $1500. This is a steep price to pay for a graphics card if the enhanced performance of a top end card is justified this is an easy choice. On the gaming side, one can debate the new features, and value of the card. When one has a workstation that is performing a lot of compute and only has room for one or two GPUs, it makes sense to maximize the amount of performance you can get.