Nvidia’s new RTX-series graphics cards have only been shipping for a few days, but already aftermarket versions are starting to appear with simply ludicrous configurations. The Aorus GeForce RTX 2080 Xtreme 8G comes with all of the Turing cores, RT cores, and general processing power of a standard (albeit likely overclocked) 2080, but it also comes with a massive three-fan cooling solution and as many as seven video output ports on the back.
Standard RTX 2080 cards ship out with five video ports, but the new Auros branded card takes that to a new level. The addition of two extra HDMI 2.0b ports brings the total to three, with an additional three DisplayPort 1.4 connectors, and a USB-C port with VirtualLink. That makes it possible to output to four different displays at once (and a VR headset) leveraging either three HDMI, a DisplayPort, and the USB-C connector, or three DisplayPort, an HDMI, and the USB-C port.
The cooling system the new Aorus card uses is also rather impressive. Ditching Nvidia’s championed two-fan configuration, it leverages the power of three 100mm fans sitting on top of a heat pipe direct touch heatsink that also covers VRAM and MOSFET chips. It’s all covered with a metal back plate for some minor cooling enhancements and a cleaner look. The fans are designed to alternate their rotations (clockwise for the center, anticlockwise for the outside two) in order to maximize airflow and avoid turbulence, resulting in quieter operation and better airflow.
Should your GPU stay cool enough under low load though, they’ll also turn off entirely, making for an utterly silent card at times.
As you might expect from a graphics card with this branding, it also supports customizable RGB lighting with full support for the Aorus Engine software, and it’s all backed up by a four-year warranty.
What we don’t know at this point is what kind of clocks we can expect with this card, nor its price. With all that extra cooling we’d expect both to come in high, but until Aorus decides to give us a release date we’ll be left guessing for the time being.
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