Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unbox today we are testing out another RTX board partner card and this one is the RT x 2080 gaming era c8g and as you can probably tell this one is from gigabyte for now it is their most premium RT x 2080 product though you can basically get the same thing with a less aggressive factory overclock for about $40 less and that is the wind force version so if you see the wind force version of this card and you're like what's the difference between it and the gaming version it's a small overclock probably won't make that much difference at the end of the day but I suppose if you're spending well over $700 u.s. at best about $700 us on a graphics card you're probably happy to pay an extra $40 for a whisker more performance just because as you can see gigabyte has gone with an extremely neutral theme with this one it's pretty much a black grey theme very minimalistic and I have to say I'm very pleased to see those orange highlights ago that they were intent on doing for quite a while there yeah great to see those gone and it's just a super stealthy design in my opinion even the RGB is very minimalistic you just have the RGB logo here the gigabyte name that's backlit and you can control that with the RGB fusion software personally I would have much preferred the gigabyte logo or name whatever you want to call I would have preferred this located over here and then the GeForce r-tx in the middle here because I think gamers would probably rather show off that it is a geforce r-tx card and this sort of glossy black finish that they've given the geforce r-tx branding isn't that easy to see it's very discreet and I think yeah as I said gamers probably rather the gigabyte name to be more discreet and that backlit here to show off though it's a Geforce RTS card something along those lines it is a very minor detail and you could argue that gamers really shouldn't care either way but I feel like that's something that people buying this card or quite a few gamers buying this card would've let me know what you guys think in the comments section below anyway that small detail aside I have to say this really is a nice looking card and the neutral design means that it will compliment any and all builds covering the heatsink is a black plastic shroud with a few gunmetal gray aluminium highlights again very stealthy looking and I very much like it also it's quite a compact high-end graphics card it's very similar to the founders edition in terms of dimensions a 50 millimetres wide it is a dual slot card and it measures 287 millimeters long and 115 millimeters tall so overall it is slightly taller and longer but interestingly weighs quite a bit less 973 grams making it 23 percent lighter than the FE model that said does feature about 10 times fewer screws speaking of screws in order to whip off the cooler just seven screws need to be removed and they're all the same size Phillips head screws see Nvidia doesn't have to be difficult with all the screws removed you then have to break the grip of the vrm and GDD are six thermal pads and then detach the fan power and RGB lighting cables at this point you will have exposed the PCB as well as the underside of the cooler let's talk about the cooler first including the plastic shroud on three fans at way 644 grams removing the shroud and fans from the heatsink requires the removal of four more screws and then we see that each fan is attached the shroud using an additional three screws per fan interestingly gigabyte hasn't just wired all the fans together but rather made them detachable so any one fan can be quickly and easily replaced this is great as it affords users the ability to purchase the fans once the cards out of warranty so you're not forced to throw the entire cooler way in favor of an aftermarket solution and they've been using these fans for quite some time the exact same fans were used way back on their GeForce GTX 980 a or around $17 u.s. finally all three fans are the same they measure 85 millimeters in diameter moving on from the fans we have the heatsink and what we have here is 442 grams of copper and aluminium in total there's half a dozen six millimeter copper heat pipes all of which come in direct contact with the r-tx 2080 die so there's no copper base here which is why the cooler is so much lighter than the version found on the founders edition there is however a nickel plated copper base plate for the GDD are six memory chips and it can be removed via four screws and taking it off we found that it accounts 56 grams of the coolers total weight it's worth noting that there isn't any thermal interface material taking up the gaps between this plate and the heatsink now for the PCB what we have here is basically the founders Edition PCB and power delivery system there are a few minor changes here and there to the layout but overall the design and components are very similar then we of course have the massive cheering GPU codenamed tu-104 there are also eight one gigabyte GDD are six memory chips providing an 8 gigabyte vm buffer the chips in question are microns MT 61 K 256 M 32 je 14a and this is of course their fourteen gigabits per second memory we also find an 8 + 2 phase very amusing on semiconductor power stages and finally a 6 pin + 8 pin power connector at this point the only thing we haven't removed is the back plate so let's quickly do that before getting into the benchmarks there's an additional three screws holding the back plate on once removed we can detach this thin sheet of aluminium underneath we find three thick thermal pads the design to reduce the amount of heat that gets trapped under this panel gigabytes targeting the area behind the vrm and GDD our six memory and therefore like many of the manufacturers we've seen so far gigabytes using the backplate as a big heat spreader okay so that's the cards physical design pretty much from top to bottom so let's go to the clock speed so we'll do a little bit of overclocking and then of course get to the benchmark results the founders Edition model operates at a boost clock of 1800 megahertz and the gigabyte gaming oh you see that one runs at eighteen hundred and fifty megahertz out of the box so it's a smidgeon fast you could say there is an option and OC mode which boosts it by another 50 megahertz to eighteen hundred and thirty megahertz but I've skipped over testing that because it's less than a 1% increase I don't think it's going to translate into many more extra frames if even an extra frame so we've skipped over that I've gone straight to my custom overclock and I'll give you all the details on that basically using MSI Afterburner I was able to increase the core by plus 150 and in the GDD r6 memory by plus 700 stock when gaming the card ran at an average of 1890 megahertz with peaks going as high as nineteen hundred and thirty five megahertz the fan speed also maxed out a whisper quiet thirteen hundred and thirty rpm making it much quieter than the FE model which went up over two thousand rpm despite running quieter the gigabyte gaming OC also maintained a four percent higher clock speed but better yet picked just 64 degrees whereas the FE card hits 76 degrees so quite shocking really that gigabytes seemingly basic air cooler is that much better I should also point out that those higher idle temps are due to the fact that the gigabyte card completely turns its fans off during light load and this is preferable to running at around thirty degrees with the fan spinning in my opinion as the cards completely silent when idle and this also greatly extends the life of the fans overclocked to the gaming AC average to clock speed of 2040 megahertz which was slightly better than the 2025 megahertz of the FE model however although the FPS performance will be very similar the operating volume and temperature isn't again the gigabyte model is much cooler and quieter hitting just 66 degrees opposed to 81 degrees and it did so while only spinning the fans and up to 1400 RPM now stock as I said the Fe model spins its fans just over 2,000 rpm and once I overclocked almost 2200 rpm hitting 76 and 81 degrees respectively so I thought why not get closer to matching that with the gaming OC by dialing the fans up to 2100 rpm using this 60% fan speed setting doing so drop to the low temperatures 57 degrees and the idle to 26 degrees as the fans are now spinning constantly this also increased the average operating clock speed to 2070 megahertz which is very impressive for those of you who don't care about noise at all you can crank the fans up to just over 3100 rpm and this reduced the load temp by a further 10 degrees and allowed for an average operating frequency of 2085 megahertz finally throw a few k-type thermocouple x' on the card allowed us to measure the sir first temperatures at the top of these components the power stages and the GDD are six memory our overclock using the auto fan settings or the vrm idle at 35 degrees and the memory at 38 degrees then under load the verum hit 49 degrees and the memory 57 degrees so both well within tolerances okay time for some FPS performance and as usual I'm using my course a GPU test rig built inside the crystal series 570 X packing a core i7 87 okay clocked at 5 gigahertz with 32 gigabytes of vengence ddr4 3400 memory please note I only have overclocked results for the founders ition model in two games as that's all I tested originally and Tim now has my EFI cards so we can investigate things such as HDR performance and DL SS anyway we do have some overclocking results to compare so let's get to the results first up we have the battlefield 1 results at the 4k resolution using the maximum quality preset if you want to see how the r-tx 2080 performs at 1440p please check out our day 1 coverage for this content we're mostly interested in how the gaming OC compares to the foundation model and for that 4k will work just as well as 1440p as the margins will be much the same here we can clearly see that out of the box the gaming OC basically delivers the same performance as the EFI model just 1 to 2 FPS better in battlefield 1 overclocking helped us squeeze another 6% more performance out of the card nothing amazing but it is free performance we see much the same in f1 2017 the gaming OC match the EFI model out of the box while our custom overclocked only slightly boosted performance and also please note the weaker-than-expected frame time performance for all the RT X GPUs are still hasn't been solved in f1 2018 with a driver update similar margins are seen when testing with Far Cry 5 here are overclock netted us 5 percent more performance this time we see an 8 percent boost for our custom overclock when testing with Assassin's Creed origins that said the gaming OC nfe models delivered the same out-of-the-box performance this time we have OC results for both the EFI and gaming OC models and as you can see in shadow of the Tomb Raider both models delivered the exact same performance of course the gear IOC is cooler and quieter as we saw earlier but overall performance is much the same and we can confirm those findings with strange the gigabyte gaming OC is able to match the founders edition performance while providing cooler temperatures and a quieter operating volume the power consumption figures are pretty much what we expected to see though the gaming OC uses slightly less power than the founders Edition that was a small surprise but overall the results are very similar overclocking only increased power consumption by four percent which is a nice trade-off given that we saw around a 5 percent performance uplift gigabytes r-tx 2080 gaming OC is a really solid graphics card delivers excellent performance the same level that you can expect from invidious founders Edition but very crucially but it does so with a lot less fuss and by that I mean the operating temperatures are lower and it makes a lot less noise and I'm not saying a found Edition card was particularly loud but this thing is basically silent even after an hour's worth of gaming full load for extended periods of time and it's just a really really quiet card and much better than the founders Edition in that regard I've got nothing bad or remotely negative to say regarding gigabytes implementation it's just a shame that the current asking price is eight hundred and thirty dollars us despite being one of the cheapest custom RT x 2080 graphics cards available right now of course it still doesn't make much sense to purchase one of these r-tx 2080 graphics cards given the gtx 1080 TI delivers a similar level of performance for around $700 us if you missed our coverage here is a quick breakdown of how the RT x 2018 gtx 1080i compare in 35 games at the floor k resolution the takeaway here being that the almost 20% increase in price isn't justified by the one percent increase in performance at the AIB MSRP of $700 us the RT x 2080 would at least make sense at that price I do recommend checking out the gigabyte gaming OSI model it's a great quality product offering excellent thermal performance and it doesn't hurt the card looks nice as well and will suit any build and that is going to do it for this video hope you guys enjoyed my review of the gaming OC graphics card from gigabyte if you did please hit the like button for subscribe for more content and if you appreciate the wait video higher on box then can supporting us on patreon thank you for watching I'm your host Steve and without knocking the graphics card off that box I'll see you again next time