Over the past few months, we’ve looked at several Turing based Nvidia cards, which are some of the best graphics cards available and often rate near the top of our GPU hierarchy. None of them have been quite like the EVGA RTX 2080 Super XC Hybrid, which consists of both an air cooler and an integrated liquid cooling solution to keep the GPU and memory frosty. In theory, that should keep temperatures down and allow boost clocks to run a bit higher than most air-cooled solutions while potentially cutting down on noise.
The EVGA RTX 2080 Super Hybrid XC we have for review comes with a small factory overclock (+15 MHz boost over reference speeds) on the core and the same 1,938 MHz (15.5 Gbps) clock speed on the RAM. We’ll see how this card and its hybrid cooling solution compares to the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition (FE), Asus ROG Strix RTX 2080 Super OC, RTX 2080 Super FE, and an RTX 2070 Super FE from the Nvidia side. Representing AMD in this review is an ASRock RX 5700 XT Taichi, Radeon VII, and reference RX 5700 and 5700 XT.
While performance was similar between the EVGA Hybrid XC and the other 2080 Super cards, the differences between them are found in the cooling solutions, features and price. At the time of this writing, both the EVGA RTX 2080 Super Hybrid XC and the Asus ROG Strix are priced around $780 while the Nvidia RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition normally goes for $700 (assuming you can find it in stock). ASRock’s RX 5700 XT Taichi is priced at $439.99 by comparison, and the RTX 2070 Super nominally goes for $500 (again, when it’s in stock).
For this review, we’ll look at performance differences in frames per second (fps), how the hybrid cooler performed compared to traditional air-cooled cards, power consumption, and overall value.
Features
Though there are some differences between the 2080 Super and other RTX models (such as the SM count and subsequently shaders, TMUs, and ROPs), all RTX 2080, 2080 Super, and 2070 Super cards sport the same Turing TU104 silicon under the hood. The TU104 die is manufactured on TSMC’s 12nm FFN (FinFET Nvidia) process using 13.6 billion transistors on a 545mm square die. All three TU104 cards come with 8GB of GDDR6 sitting on a 256-bit bus.
Clock speeds on the EVGA RTX 2080 Super Hybrid XC are set at 1,650 MHz base clock with a listed boost clock of 1,830 MHz. Unlike AMD cards, the Nvidia GPUs’ listed boost clocks are more of a minimum whereas AMD boost clocks are a maximum (they run a lot closer to the Game Clock). Memory speed for the card is set to 1,938 MHz (15.5 Gbps effective) which yields 496.1 GB/s bandwidth. This configuration is enough for gaming at its target resolutions of 2560×1440 or 3840×2160 (4K UHD).
Nvidia lists the Geforce RTX 2080 Super as a 250W card in Founders Edition form and recommends a 650W power supply. EVGA doesn’t change the power draw or power supply recommendation for the Hybrid XC. 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors are required.
The following table summarizes the specifications of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080 Super and RTX 2080 Founders Editions, along with the EVGA and Asus RTX 2080 Super cards.
Design
The EVGA RTX 2080 Super Hybrid XC is a dual-slot video card measuring 10.4 x 4.4 x 1.6 inches (265.6 x 111.2 x 40 mm). The card is full-size and sticks out about an inch past the width of our ATX motherboard, making this a long card though certainly not the biggest we’ve tested. Height shouldn’t be a concern as it sits flush with the I/O plate, but due to the length, it may not fit into small form factor (SFF) systems. Be sure to verify the space inside your chassis before buying.
Like air-cooled cards, our Hybrid cooled EVGA uses a stylish plastic shroud with the GeForce RTX 2080 Super name stenciled across its smoked tinted cover. On top is “EVGA Hybrid” naming lit up through the only RGBs we find. On the right is a single ~85mm fan attached directly to a large heatsink, which blows cool air across the VRMs and out the rear and I/O side. The back of the card sports a matte black powder-coated metal backplate that protects the rear of the PCB and helps passively cool the VRMs.
In order to cool the GPU and memory, a 120mm radiator attaches directly to the GPU core while a dedicated memory plate makes direct contact with the water cooling block for optimal memory temperatures. Attached to the high fins per inch (FPI) radiator is a swappable 120mm fan that does a good job moving air quietly. Both fans have their own custom curves and can be controlled manually through EVGA Precision X1 software. The VRM fan remains off during idle and low load operation, helping to minimize noise.
The EVGA RTX 2080 Super Hybrid XC uses a reference PCB sporting an 8+2 phase (GPU and Memory) VRM setup. The GPU VRM is controlled by an 8-channel uP9512P part, while the memory VRM is controlled by a uP9529P controller. The GDDR6 chips hidden below the memory plate are made by Samsung (P/N K4Z80325BC-HC16) and specified to run at 2000 MHz (16 Gbps effective). Even though this is a reference board, Nvidia did a good job ensuring the power delivery system could handle stock and overclocked operation.
I/O ports on the EVGA card are standard fare for high-end Turing and include three DisplayPorts (1.4b), a single HDMI (2.0b) port and a VirtualLink USB Type-C port designed for VR headsets.
How We Tested the EVGA RTX 2080 Super XC Hybrid
Our current graphics card test system consists of Intel’s Core i9-9900K, an 8-core/16-thread CPU that routinely ranks as the fastest overall gaming CPU. The MSI MEG Z390 Ace motherboard is paired with 2x16GB Corsair Vengeance Pro RGB DDR4-3200 CL16 memory (CMK32GX4M2B3200C16). Keeping the CPU cool is a Corsair H150i Pro RGB AIO, along with a 120mm Sharkoon fan for general airflow across the test system. Storing our OS and gaming suite is a single 2TB Kingston KC2000 NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 drive.
The motherboard is running BIOS version 7B12v17. Optimized defaults were used to set up the system. We then enabled the memory’s XMP profile to get the memory running at the rated 3200 MHz CL16 specification. No other BIOS changes or performance enhancements were enabled. The latest version of Windows 10 (1909) is used and is fully updated as of March 2020.
Our GPU hierarchy provides a complete overview of the GPUs at the heart of various graphics cards and how the various models stack up against each other. For these individual third-party card reviews, we primarily focus on GPUs that compete with and are close in performance to the card that is being reviewed. However, we’ve overhauled our charting system and are including multiple other GPUs now. The main points of interest will be the RTX 2080 Ti FE, RTX 2080 Super FE, RTX 2070 Super FE along with an Asus ROG Strix RTX 2080 Super OC. For AMD, we have the Radeon VII, RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 reference cards, along with an ASRock RX 5700 XT Taichi.
Our list of test games is currently Borderlands 3, The Division 2, Far Cry 5, Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers, Forza Horizon 4, Metro Exodus, Red Dead Redemption 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Strange Brigade. These titles represent a broad spectrum of genres and APIs, which gives us a good idea of the relative performance differences between the cards. We’re using driver build 442.78 for the Nvidia cards and Adrenalin 20.4.1 drivers for AMD.
We capture our frames per second (fps) and frame time information by running OCAT during our benchmarks. For The Division 2 and Metro Exodus we use the .csv files the built-in benchmark creates. For clock and fan speed, temperature and power, we use GPU-Z’s logging capabilities. We’ll be resuming our use of the Powenetics-based system for graphics card reviews in the near future.
Looking at the 1440p ultra results, we see the EVGA RTX 2080 Super XC Hybrid averaged 105.8 fps across all nine games. The air-cooled Asus ROG Strix 2080 Super OC averaged 105.9 fps while the RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition averaged 104.9 fps—a virtual tie in overall performance. Every game averages more than 60 fps, and several are over 100 fps, allowing for high refresh gaming at these settings.
AMD’s current flagship Radeon RX 5700 XT holds its own, managing 90 fps on average with the factory overclocked ASRock EX 5700 XT Taichi, and 86.8 fps with the reference 5700 XT. Both are well behind any 2080 Super, but they’re nearly tied with AMD’s slightly older Radeon VII. Obviously, AMD’s RX 5700 series competes on price and not just raw performance, and until Big Navi arrives this is AMD’s best solution.
We should also note that all GPUs are tested using DirectX 12 in Borderlands 3, The Division 2, Metro Exodus, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider—and the Vulkan API for Red Dead Redemption 2 and Strange Brigade. We mention this because in many games that have DirectX 11 as an option, they actually run slightly better on Nvidia cards in that mode. Borderlands 3 in particular is typically around 10% faster in DX11 on Nvidia GPUs at 1440p and 4K, but even Division 2 and Metro Exodus see a modest 3-5% uplift. And of course, for games like Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, DX12 is required if you want to use ray tracing on an RTX card.
We felt it best to standardize on one API for each game, as it helps simplify testing. Otherwise, we’d need to check performance in every API offered for each game to determine the best choice for each GPU at each resolution and setting. That increases the number of test runs and thus testing time by 66%, plus we’d need a lengthy explanation saying which API was used on each GPU at each setting. Besides, long term we expect more games to begin using DX12 and/or Vulkan exclusively, especially once the next generation of consoles arrive with ray tracing hardware support.
Moving up to 4K, we chose to use the ultra results as the EVGA 2080 Super XC Hybrid (and the other 2080 Supers) averaged over 60 fps in our tests — albeit by a slim margin. The EVGA card reached 62 fps, the Asus 61.6, and the Founders Edition at 61.2 fps. Again we see very little difference between the three 2080 Super cards, but average fps doesn’t tell the whole story.
Of our nine games, five of them, Shadow of the Tomb Raider (55.4 fps), Red Dead Redemption 2 (46.5 fps), Metro: Exodus (42.1 fps), The Division 2 (46.2 fps) and Borderlands 3 (38.9 fps) were below 60 fps. You can likely have a smooth gaming experience on SOTTR (without ray tracing), but other games would require a reduction in image quality for the best results.
We use GPU-Z logging to measure each card’s power consumption, temperatures and fan speeds with the Metro Exodus benchmark running at 2560×1440 using the default Ultra settings. The card is warmed up prior to testing and logging is started after settling to an idle temperature (after about 10 minutes). The benchmark is looped a total of five times, which yields around 10 minutes of testing. In the charts, you will see periodic blips in power use that are a result of the benchmark ending one loop and starting the next.
We also use FurMark to capture worst-case power readings. Although both Nvidia and AMD consider the application a ‘power virus,’ or a program that deliberately taxes the components beyond normal limits, the data we can gather from it offers useful information about a card’s capabilities outside of typical gaming loads. For example, certain GPU compute workloads including cryptocurrency mining have power use that can track close to FurMark, sometimes even exceeding it.
Power Draw
Starting off with the gaming power charts, the EVGA RTX 2080 Super XC Hybrid averaged 238W, which puts the card between the Asus ROG Strix at 246W and the RTX 2080 Super FE at 232W. These results fall where expected. Users will be hard-pressed to notice a difference in their electric bill between them.
Looking at the Furmark results, the differences between the cards shrank dramatically with the EVGA and Asus both using 247W while the Founders Edition averaged 248W. This tells us all of these cards have a power limit around the 250W mark, as expected.
Temperatures
Temperatures during game testing reached a peak of 53 degrees Celsius on the EVGA Hybrid card which is 9 degrees Celsius less than the Asus ROG Strix (62C) while the Founders Edition peaked at the highest temperature of 72C. In this short testing, the 120mm AIO did a great job on the GPU temperatures, the lowest we’ve recorded for this test, in fact. Because of the lower temperatures, the EVGA card is able to maintain higher boost bins, as we’ll see below.
Temperatures when running Furmark weren’t much different than during the gaming test. Nvidia cards tend to throttle hard when running this stress test so temperatures tend to be similar. The EVGA Hybrid peaked at 53 degrees Celsius, the Asus at 61C, and the Founders Edition at 75C. All coolers are able to keep the cards running here, but the AIO on the EVGA card is again the coolest by far.
Fan Speeds
Fan speeds for the EVGA cover the fan running on the card cooling the VRMs. In this case, it peaked around 1,700 RPM in this testing while the Asus ROG Strix and Founders Edition cards ran faster at 1,750 MHz and 2,000 RPM peaks. The loudest part on the card is the pump, as both the onboard fan and the one attached to the radiator stayed quiet throughout.
Like temperatures, not much changed with fan speeds either. All card fan speeds ramped up smoothly trying to manage thermals. The EVGA Hybrid’s VRM cooling fan reached around 1,700 RPM, the slowest of the test cards. The fan on the radiator peaked at 1,600 RPM with both operating quietly throughout testing. The pump and its distinct hum will be heard over the fans.
Clock Rates
Clock speeds for the EVGA Hybrid card averaged the highest in our game tests at 1,993 MHz. Compare this to the Asus ROG Strix at 1,988 MHz—only 5 MHz behind. While that isn’t much, the Asus card is supposed to run 30 MHz faster according to the boost clocks. But since the hybrid card kept the GPU cooler than the air-cooled Asus, it reached higher overall boost clocks.
Clock speeds during Furmark dropped tremendously on these Nvidia video cards as is normally the case. Here the EVGA hybrid averaged 1,819 MHz while the Asus ROG Strix used in the test was notably lower at 1,776 MHz. Again we see the benefits of the cooler running EVGA card able to maintain higher clocks. These workloads aren’t typical, so users can expect clocks speeds during gaming to be closer to the game test.
EVGA includes its own software for monitoring and tweaking video cards, called Precision X1. The application is able to control the video card from fan speeds to clock speeds as well as monitoring capabilities. Users are able to overclock manually or using the built-in ‘VF Tuner’ to automatically search for a stable overclock as well as set up manual/static fan speeds and create custom curves.
One unique feature within Precision X1 is the boost lock function that locks the clock speeds to the boost clock regardless of external factors — it’s like overclocking the old school way (without boost affecting things). It can also be useful if you want to test a GPU at a static clock speed to compare performance with other GPUs.
EVGA Precision X1 works well for its intended purposes, offering users a complete application for monitoring and controlling both EVGA and other card partner video cards. Along with MSI Afterburner, it’s one of the two best GPU overclocking and monitoring utilities around.
EVGA’s RTX 2080 Super XC Hybrid proved to be more than capable at 1440p using ultra settings and 4K at high to ultra settings in most games. Compared to the RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition and Asus ROG Strix RTX 2080 Super OC, the integrated AIO kept the core temperatures much cooler. Since the hybrid card runs around 10C cooler than the others, it boosted higher than even the Asus, which is rated 30 MHz higher out of the box.
However, even with the differences in boost clocks and cooling, all three 2080 Super cards performed nearly the same, with less than 1 fps between them. The lower temperatures can be great for hotter climates and part longevity, or if you want to manually overclock, but out of the box performance isn’t going to vary much between the various RTX 2080 Super models.
Although the EVGA RTX 2080 Super XC Hybrid was generally quiet, the pump makes a distinct hum that’s different from the fans on the card and radiator, as well as any chassis fans. This is typical of most liquid cooling solutions and inherent to pumps in general. We didn’t find the sound loud or off putting, but it was noticeable over the other PC fans. The EVGA card’s fans meanwhile were quiet throughout testing.
For many users, the price for a graphics card is a huge factor, and none of the RTX 2080 Supers are anywhere close to being affordable. The EVGA RTX 2080 Super Hybrid XC and the Asus ROG Strix 2080 Super both cost around $780, while the Nvidia RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition can often be found for $700 (at least, it can be when COVID-19 is screwing up the supply chain). The least expensive RTX 2080 Super we can find right now is this PNY RTX 2080 Super blower, priced at $694 — and unless you really like blowers, we’d recommend paying $6 more for the Founders Edition or something like the MSI Ventus XS OC. Sticking with hybrid cooling cards, MSI’s RTX 2080 Super Sea Hawk X lists for $734.99, while the Gigabyte Aorus Waterforce RTX 2080 Super sports a large 2x120mm radiator and goes for $839.99.
One thing you really need to consider when buying a hybrid cooled graphics card is the size and placement of both the card and the radiator. Most mid-size and larger ATX cases should be able to accommodate both, but smaller cases can be a problem. Not to mention, the radiator is one more thing to deal with when cleaning out your PC or swapping components.
The EVGA RTX 2080 Super XC Hybrid proved to be a capable card for both 1440p and 4K gaming, though the latter in some titles will require tuning of settings. The hybrid cooler with a 120mm radiator did a great job keeping the GPU cool during testing. However, even though we saw higher boost clocks, the performance gained from the small difference ended up being negligible. Priced between other hybrid cards, the EVGA XC is a viable solution. Just come for the thermals rather than the out of box performance.