Although the nVidia RTX 2000 series came a long time ago, although we've gone through all the variants, the "wonder" of the RTX 2080 cards, the ROG Strix RTX 2080 OC has escaped us. But on the last moment I managed to get my hand on one of the ROG Strix card and so we were able to test it.

Asus ROG Strix RTX 2080 OC is not a cheap card, it is almost $1000 but its performance is worth the money. This board will definitely perform for at least 5 years from now on, plus it's ready for future games thanks to Real Time Ray Tracing.

The cardis large, with no less than three fans, which are fortunately silent if left at automatic speed. The GPU has 1515MHz base frequency with a Boost up to 1860MHz, and in Gaming or Boost mode it reaches up to 1890MHz in OC mode.

The RTX 2080 has 2944 CUDA processors, compared to RTX 2070 that has 2304 CUDA processors. It has a 8GB GDDR6 vRAM on 256Bit that has a bandwidth of 448GB/s, so identical to the RTX 2070. When we talk about Ray Tracing, the RTX 2080 offers up to 10 Gigarays per second compared to RTX 2070 which has 6 Gigarays per second, so we have significantly better performances in games that use this technology.

The card has a 225W theoretical TDP, but if we take into account that this variant has higher frequencies and a supply of 2 x 8 pins, it is certain that the 225W TDPs are outdated. However, the design of the power stage and cooling system is well done and we should not worry about it, plus the card overclocks over preset frequencies manually. For connectivity we have two HDMI, one USB Type C and two Display port.

To test the card we used an AMD Ryzen 7 2700x based system, 16GB RAM (2x8GB) DDR4 at 3200MHz and a Samsung SSD 960 Pro nvme. For comparison, we used a MSI RTX 2070 Gaming Z and tested the board in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Shadow on the Tomb Raider, Far Cry 5 and Battlefield 5 with DXR ON and OFF.

As we can see in the graphs above the numbers speak for themselves. In Assassin's Creed Odyssey we had an average of 61 fps for the RTX 2070 while the RTX 2080 had an average of 68FPS, so a 7 fps difference.

In Shadow on the Tomb Raider, the RTX 2070 had an average of 99 fps and the RTX 2080 got an average of 107 fps, so a difference of 9 fps.

In Battlefield 5 with DXR ON we had 62 fps for RTX 2070 and 72 fps for RTX 2080, a difference of almost 10 fps and with DXR OFF we got an average of 116 fps with RTX 2070 and 121 fps with RTX 2080 , so 5 fps difference.

In Far Cry 5 both had an average of 89 fps , so the RTX 2070 is on average weaker with almost 8 fps compared to RTX 2080.

The ASUS ROG Strix 2080 OC sure does what it’s supposed to do but if you are looking for a cheaper card then an RTX 2070 will do the job just fine as from the above tests we can see that the difference in FPS is not that big. But if you are not willing to compromise than the Strix 2080 OC might be the card for you.