Gigabyte launches an overclocked GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with a blower-style cooler

News
By published

Looks can be deceiving.

Nvidia is pushing a newly designed cooling solution for the overclocked Founders Edition variants of its GeForce RTX series graphics cards, though there are still cards out there with blower-style coolers, if that's your preference. One of them is Gigabyte's new Aorus GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Turbo 11G.

The card is rather conservative in appearance, based on the press renders. In what's becoming a rarity these days, there isn't any RGB lighting. Gigabyte slapped its Aorus logo on the card and went with a two-tone finish, but other than that, Gigabyte kept it simple.

Despite the tame appearance, the card earns its 'Turbo' designation with a 1,650MHz core clockspeed out of the box. That's 105MHz faster than reference (1,545MHz), and even slightly speedier than Nvidia's FE model, which is overclocked to 1,635MHz.

If this was street racing, Gigabyte's new card would be dubbed a sleeper. That said, how often it throttles will depend on your system and airflow. There's only one fan on this thing, and generally speaking, cards with blower-style coolers run hotter and louder than cards with custom coolers and multiple fans.

The advantage of a blower-style cooler, however, is that it expels hot air out of the case. To help with cooling, Gigabyte equipped the card with a large copper heatsink and a vapor chamber layer that makes direct contact with the GPU. Gigabyte says it designed the card and cooling solution for systems that use mutliple graphics cards in space-restricted cases.

"The specially designed exterior increases the intake airflow of the graphics card in a limited space, and then the heat generated by the graphics card is quickly taken out of the entire chassis by the ultra-durable blower fan," Gigabyte says.

It's not clear when the card will actually be available for purchase or how much it will cost.

Paul Lilly
Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).