That's food for thought then. Still unsure if I want to do water cooling because my fear of it breaking and destroying absolutely everything is eternal. On the flip side, if I think about it rationally, I bet dust taking down a system is much more likely, and the amount of dust generation in this room is starting to get absurd.

Anyway, not to stray too far from the subject, I'm looking forward to actual reviewers getting their hands on these cards. I want to see how much of a step up they actually are, especially if they're charing so much money for them.

I never water cooled anything personally, my 5820k is overclocked to 4.4 at 1.3v on air and its worked great for me, though i know thats a pretty modest overclock and if i really tinkered with it i could get the voltage down a bit more but my temps are fine and its not worth the hassle. I never bother to overclock cards though as it seems stupid on air, there pretty hot already unless your doing water. One question i have though if anyone knows, i bought a Noctua cooler for this build back in 2014 and its a great CPU cooler, but its so big i cant use the first pci-e slot on my board. I have to use the second one which means im running on a 8x lane. Will that matter at all on a single card setup? I know on current cards 8x is plenty, but I dont really mind getting a new cooler if i have to, was my one mistake with this x99 build, thanks.

This needs some benchmarks. The insane price tag seems to be related to the new tech added on these cards, but what about the moment to moment gameplay performance? Review cards are supposedly out, yet I am sure NDAs are in place. The waiting game isn't over yet...

$1,200+ is a bit steep for me. I was hoping these would drive the price of the 1080's down, but these are so high, the 1080's seem like a bargain. Not sure if that's genius or madness.

@sanity: I run my 1070 in the 8x slot as well, just because of the way my water cooling loop is set up. You're right, for current cards it doesn't matter but It is possible the difference will be greater with a 2080 Ti. I would doubt it but I can't say for sure.

Positive air pressure and filters on your intake fans should solve most dust problems.

Fuck it. I just got drunk and put a bunch of bids on 1080tis that are going crazy cheap right now (low 500s). 11gb of vram is still a shit ton, and I'm betting ray tracing will be an nvidia gameworks gimmick for the next year or two until some kinks are ironed out. At least that's what I'm telling myself.

Also blow it out every 6 months. Fall and spring every year i take a air compressor to it, just maker sure theirs no water in the air lines obviously.

Ha, I don't condone drunk purchasing but honestly buying a 1080 Ti from the people who pre-ordered the new cards is a good move.

@big_denim: I would wait until benchmarks, there claiming the 2070 is going to be better then a Titan XP, hard to say but if thats the case better to spend 500 bucks on current gen.

@sanity: It's true, benchmarks aren't out yet but that's a ridiculous claim and is probably only meant to apply to "RTX operations".

Yea, i agree, but theirs so many cards that are going to be dumped ebay will be full the rest of the year. Even if a 2070 runs around the same as a 1080ti or a tad less i think id still rather have the newer tech and benefit from drivers more. No wrong answer though the 1080ti is a great card and will be for awhile yet.

@sanity: True... This is just conjecture but I will say a 1080 Ti is still going to be faster than a 2070 in standard benchmarks. Looking at specs I wouldn't be surprised if it's is on par or faster than the 2080 in some cases.

Waiting for reviews is the right move, though. Unless you want the best possible GPU then that's easy and you get a 2080 Ti.

@sanity: Hey I think a 2080Ti would be great for 2560x1440 144hz. Many of my games don’t go much above 60fps on my 980ti. I doubt all of them will hit 144 even with the 2080ti. As for FE cards, I’d be wary of them even though they’re overclocked. The 980ti FE for one didn’t even have a factory overclock and ended up throttled all the time because the cooling was terrible and the cards hit the 84C temperature limit all the time. Waiting for the premium cooled 3rd party cards is almost always the best course of action.

@chrjz: I don’t think the choice is that easy. Which 2080ti do you get? There’s going to be a big difference between a reference card and the premium cooled and overclocked 3rd party cards. There are also other considerations. Things like fan noise issues, coil whine, etc. that crop up in certain models.

@atomicoldman: 60C while idle is nuts! The Gigabyte Xtreme 1070 I have right now doesn't even get to 60C in most games. It's also really nice that the fans don't even kick on until it's 60C, I can see when the fans come on. To be fair it does have a giant heatsink and 3 fans on it.

Beat me to it. I don't even use filters, just slightly positive pressure, and it solved all my dust problems.

So basically, crank my front fan all the way up and it should actually reduce dust accumulation?

I'm an idiot and though I would just be sucking more in. :V

Fans also don't kick on in mine until it hits 60C. And to be fair, there would hardly be a temperature change when I would start playing a game. The fans would kick in and keep the card resting between 60-70C depending on the game.

I really did try everything to fix it. Removed all traces of the drivers, did a clean install, made sure I had it set to adaptive power, etc, etc. Nothing I did would keep it operating normally for very long and it would just slip back into the habit of not downclocking after playing games. Sometimes it would just shoot up like it was in use when it isn't, just while idling on the desktop with nothing running. I doubt it was some kind of mining virus because it wasn't being thrown into 100% power. I still don't know what causes that issue with my card and if anyone can illuminate me I'd love to get to the bottom of it, but for now I use software that lets me set a memory threshold and downclock when it's not being met. Everything runs fine now, 8% power draw while farting around on the internet, 11% with my tablet in, temps at 38/45C respectively during the Summer months in a room where the sun really beats down. Seems about as it should be. But I have to run that client or it jumps up again.

This is part of why I just want a new card, hoping that it will resolve some of those issues and that I'll be able to worry less about any funkiness. Looking around in the past, I noticed that others had similar downclocking issues with 980s so I'm assuming it's something with that card specifically. If the 1000s are better about that, I may just get one as prices drop, but it's a shame the 2000s are going to cost an arm and a leg.

@atomicoldman: i did the math based on my fans and found the sweet spot with all of then so that I have just slight positive pressure but it’s enough to do the job. I love my fan curves.

@atomicoldman: I had the not downclocking issue before with my 980ti and I think it was because something was using the video driver. It was some background program or service and now I can’t remember what it was. There’s a way to see all the things using 3D clocks on your card and I can’t remember how to do that either. GPU-Z or MSI Afterburner can see that maybe?

I use GPU-Z, but never looked into anything as far as the program telling you what is making use of the 3D clocks. I should look into that! I did go through a long process of making sure background processes were shut off, one-by-one, to see if any particular thing was responsible, but I may have missed something assuming it was too vital to shut off or I don't know what. If you do recall what it was for you, do let me know.

I'm just glad it's not me. For a while I thought my card was busted, and while it's still not a great thing to deal with, at least it's not uncommon.

@atomicoldman: I found this thread about figuring out how to see what programs are using your card. Hope it helps. It seems Process Hacker is a good program for that. https://superuser.com/questions/585532/how-can-i-identify-which-processes-are-using-the-gpu

Apparently the 2080 is up to 50% faster than the 1080 in traditionally rendered games. If this is actually true then this or the 2080ti seem like a great upgrade for anyone with a 1080 or lower. If I had a 1080ti I’d be a little less sure. Personally, as someone with a 980ti, one of these cards sound like a pretty solid upgrade. https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/8/22/17769122/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-performance-benchmarks-games

@haneybd87: Still very excited to see some reviews and third party benchmarks but looks like going from a 980 to a 2080 Ti is going to be quite the upgrade.

@bollard: Yeah the only thing I’m waiting for is to see which third party card is the fastest/coolest/quietest.

No plans to upgrade, but I am hoping the Giant Bomb guys schedule an unboxing so I can at least experience the excitement.

I'll wait for benchmarks and whatnot but it seems that the RTX 2070 is a better upgrade than a GTX 1080 and it comes at a lower cost. Colour me interested!

This makes no sense, but I'm looking forward to the benchmarks!

@rorie said:

This makes no sense, but I'm looking forward to the benchmarks!

Basically the light green is adding in the performance gain of using DLSS which is a new form of anti aliasing, there off-loading AA to the tensor core on those games so you end up with a big performance increase, what they didn't say is what kind of AA there comparing it with in the first place. Its interesting stuff, but the fact that the game has to have support for it means that Nvidia will have to push developers to add it. Not sure how hard that is to do, but i hope it gains traction if there is that good of a boost to performance and it dont end up being another gimmick. I am wondering if you can run ray tracing and DLSS at the same time or if it would bog the tensor core down too much.

I find it telling that they compare the 2080 to a 1080 and not a 1080 Ti. It's just not as big of an improvement as previous generations and their really trying to impress with all the new technology.

There won't be a huge difference between 2080 Ti models especially if you do some of your own overclocking. All of them should be faster then any lower tier card and fan noise and coil whine are things to consider when buying any GPU.

A 2070 is expected to start at $500 I thought... You can get a 1080 for less than that right now.

It will probably be the best bang for your buck out of the 20XX line, though.

It seems like the graph is showing performance ratio between the new card compare to the old card, with the old card set to 1. Basically it is showing the new card is ~50% or more faster than the old. The footnote also say this is at 4k resolution...rather you trust them to hold all other parameters (texture, shadow, DoF, etc.) constant is up to you.

@chrjz: How much you can overclock the card is going to be dependant on the cooling and how the chips are binned. If it’s anything like basically every other generation of cards some will be bad at cooling and some will be great. Some will be loud and some will be quiet. Some models will consistently be able to overclock higher because those models are binned better and some won’t be able to go much higher than whatever stock overclock is applied. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we see in the range of a 15-25% delta between the worst and the best cards, if previous generations are any indicator. That all said we won’t be able to know any of this until we start to see reviews.

For reference, check out this review of the Gigabyte 980ti G1 Gaming. Even the stock overclocked fps beats the base 980ti by a large portion. Note that overclocking the base 980ti wouldn’t gain any performance because even at stock clocks these cards were hitting their 84c thermal limit and downclocking.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Gigabyte/GTX_980_Ti_G1_Gaming/

@haneybd87: Yeah, there are always cards that perform slightly better and cost more too but it also comes to the silicon lottery in some cases. I've been water cooling for a while so I don't really pay attention to what cooler is on a card...

My original post about it being an easy choice if you want the best GPU just meant that any 2080 Ti is going to be better than a 2080 or 1080 Ti.

@chrjz: Ah I see what you’re saying, still important to wait for reviews for a variety of reasons. FYI the silicon lottery is rigged. The more expensive cards with higher stock overclocks are fairly consistently better overclockers than the lower end versions. If you want to overclock higher spend more money, basically.

As ever, I'll wait to see what the 3rd party manufacturers do with the card before making any kind of decision. But at the moment I feel I'll just be hanging on to the 1080ti until the next iteration (3080ti?)

1080 still does the job. Ill prob get a 2080 late next year, or when Cyberpunk 2077 comes out. Prob upgrade the motherboard and throw it in sli with the 1080.

I know I said that I was fine with 1080p and my STRIX 1060, but I'm getting some extra cash fairly soon and I want more frames in Final Fantasy XV, Monster Hunter World, and play around with 4K through DSR because fuck it, so I might just be a shithead and buy a 2070 with all of the RGB. ...and most likely a new power supply since I'm surprised that my Corsair CX500M hasn't exploded yet.