ASUS RoG STRIX RTX 2080 Ti Graphics Card Review

A Closer Look

The ASUS ROG RTX 2080 Ti is an absolute monster, although show me a 2080 Ti that isn’t. The cooler alone is 2.7 slots deep, and a fair bit wider than the rear bracket too. The card almost looks banana shaped too, as the middle section is somewhat swollen, while the front and rear of the card taper off slightly.

Axial Fans

The card is pretty significant though, and features an extended PCB, providing room for greatly increased radiator space, and those three Axial-fans. The fans are quite interesting, with their rotating fan surround design.

Personally, I don’t like the look of them, but they do offer more airflow, less noise, and they”re IP5X dust resistance; so perhaps looks aren’t everything.

On the rear of the card, you’ll find a massive full-metal backplate design. It will provide a huge amount of strength and rigidity to the card, which is great given the cards size. It’ll also provide some cooling for the PCB, and there are even ventilation holes cut out to allow airflow to some of the components.

The back of the GPU also has a cool ASUS eye logo design, which is RGB lit the same as the rest of the card. Of course, you can control all of the RGB with the Aura Sync software from ASUS too.

Fan Connect

One of the cooler features, literally, are these hidden fan headers on the card. Using these, you can connect your front panel fans, and the GPU will spin them up when it needs more air, rather than just spinning the GPU fans hardware when there’s very little airflow. A simple and clever idea that really works very well.

This card is packing some serious hardware and performance figures, so it’s no surprise that it’ll need 8+8 headers. There are some voltage checkpoints on the corner of the PCB there too, which may be handy to the LN2 crowd.

Another nice touch is the black finish on the rear mount, although the use of silver screws pretty much negates the clean look here anyway; Doh!

RGB Speaks a Thousand Words