Asus shows off ROG Strix RTX 2080

With the lid now officially off of the upcoming Nvidia GeForce RTX 2000 Series, Asus has used Gamescom 2018 as a chance to show off the latest iteration of its flagship GPU design in the form of the ROG Strix RTX 2080.

Continuing the theme of using a cooler that is bloody massive, the ROG Strix RTX 2080 has a ‘2.7-slot’ design, meaning it will occupy three full expansion slots when installed, and it’s larger than the previous 2.5-slot design, and Asus claims to have extended the total cooling surface area by 20 percent. Coupled with improvements to the fan design and the heatsink fins themselves, Asus reckons it can run GPUs 7°C cooler at the same noise levels compared to the previous generation cooler.

Since we were only able to obtain external shots, we can’t speak of the PCB design, but we do know that the ROG Strix RTX 2080 comes with RGB illumination on both the plastic shroud and the metal backplate as usual. Outputs will be two HDMI 2.0b ports and two DisplayPort 1.4a headers, and interestingly the card also includes a USB 3.1 Type-C output. There are also two onboard fan headers for connecting system fans and controlling them based on the GPU temperature.

We know from part of the full name of the card, ‘O8G’, that the ROG Strix RTX 2080 will be overclocked out of the box, but it’s unknown what the clock speed of the core will actually be. Similarly, it’s not yet known whether the 8GB of GDDR6 will be overclocked.

ROG Strix cards are never cheap, and the RTX 2080 looks set to continue that trend and then some. Nvidia has set a base price for the RTX 2080 of $699 (approx. £650 via a direct conversion once 20 percent tax is accounted for), and Nvidia’s own Founders Edition has gone up for pre-order here for £749 including VAT. This card? Just a cool £1,000 – that’s creeping very close to the lower end of the scale for RTX 2080 Ti cards.

Meanwhile, a ROG Strix RTX 2080 Ti has also appeared on etailer websites for pre-order. This will feature the same design as the RTX 2080 version, and this time the price will be an eye-watering £1,500. For reference, the ROG Strix GTX 1080 Ti launched with a retail price of “just” £800 a mere 18 months or so ago.

Then again, a GTX 2080 Ti has a million times the mega-giga RTX ray-OPS compared to a GTX 1080 Ti, or something, right? So it’s all fine, right? RIGHT?