Gigabyte unveils a couple of liquid-cooled GeForce RTX 2080 Super cards

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One of the new cards comes with its own liquid cooling loop.

(Image credit: Gigabyte)

The recently launched GeForce RTX 2080 Super is the best graphics card for 4K gaming at a (fairly) reasonable price, at least compared to ones that are substantially faster (RTX 2080 Ti and Titan RTX). It's also already been given the liquid-cooled treatment, courtesy of Gigabyte.

Gigabyte is rolling out two Aorus Waterforce editions. They include the Aorus GeForce RTX 2080 Super Waterforce 8G and Aorus GeForce RTX 2080 Super WB 8G. Only two letters separate the two ("WB"), but there is an important distinction.

The Waterforce 8G model is equipped with a self-contained liquid cooler, whereas the Waterforce WB 8G comes with a waterblock that you incorporate into your own custom water cooling setup.

Gigabyte revved the boost clockspeed on both cards to 1,860MHz, up from Nvidia's 1,815MHz reference clock. The 8GB of GDDR6 memory is untouched, however, running at 15.5Gbps.

It may be possible to overclock even further, though we have not tested either model. However, Gigabyte says that both cards are "built for extreme overclocking" due to a combination of liquid-cooled thermals and a 12+2 power phase design. This essentially insinuates cleaner power delivery for better stability and potentially improved overclocking headroom.

Users who opt for the Waterforce 8G model will need to make sure they have room in their case for a 240mm radiator.

Both cards are backed by a 4-year warranty. Gigabyte did not announce availability or pricing, though a cursory glance at Newegg shows that every single RTX 2080 Super model is out of stock at the time of this writing.

As a point of reference, though, EVGA's GeForce RTX 2080 Super FTW3 Hybrid card sports a 120mm radiator and costs $809.99 on Newegg, and $769.99 on EVGA's website (there's a $40 instant rebate knocks the price down).

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).