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Review: Palit GeForce RTX 2080 GameRock Premium Edition

by Parm Mann on 28 September 2018, 12:00

Tags: Palit, NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

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Conclusion

Tech demos and closed simulations are all well and good, but Nvidia needs RTX-enabled games to come to market, and fast.

RTX 2080 is turning into something of a conundrum. It is ultimately a powerful, forward-looking GPU whose architecture could help transform the PC gaming experience, however the frustration is that there aren't yet any high-profile titles that champion what the Turing architecture is all about.

Let's put it this way, if Half Life 3 were to launch tomorrow, with ray-tracing support and a DLSS performance boost of 40 per cent, we imagine the queue for RTX 2080s would be a lot longer than it is. Tech demos and closed simulations are all well and good, but Nvidia needs RTX-enabled games to come to market, and fast.

As it stands, the lofty £750 starting price is a large hurdle for gamers to have to overcome, and such obstacles don't bode well for partner cards that typically attract an additional premium. Palit's RTX 2080 GameRock Premium Edition, at £830, does almost everything you would expect a custom card to do; it is cooler, quieter and faster than reference, but the margins are small, and at the current price point we'd be inclined to lean toward the cheaper, sleeker and almost-as-quick Founders Edition.

Bottom line: Palit's GameRock Premium Edition may be one of the quicker RTX 2080s around, but the price tag needs to drop below £800 for it to warrant recommendation.

The Good
  
The Bad
Fastest RTX 2080 we've tested
Keeps quiet at all times
Good cooling performance
Turing architecture holds promise
  
Price
Wasted RGB lighting
Not much faster than GTX 1080 Ti



Palit GeForce RTX 2080 GameRock Premium Edition

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The Palit GeForce RTX 2080 GameRock Premium Edition graphics card is available to order from Overclockers.

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At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.


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HEXUS Forums :: 2 Comments

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Posted by Dashers - Wed 03 Oct 2018 13:57
I guess the real question will be how important will ray-tracing be? Especially as it's an nvidia exclusive currently.

It smells a bit like PhysX - it looks really good, but even with nvidia cards, I landed up disabling it a lot of the time because it was just eye-candy that sacrificed frame rate.

I cannot see:
a) this card being faster at playing games that have raytracing on than off
b) games being unplayable on cards that don't support raytracing

Ergo - why would I pay the eye-watering amount for one?

I'm never going to be in a market for a 2080, but from the reviews so far, I don't see a 2070 argument being any different.
Posted by whatif - Tue 09 Oct 2018 22:06
Like the graphics on the backplate, but how do you get to see it when it is fitted into a case.
Thanks for the honest review.
At the moment, it seems pointless upgrading from a decent GTX 10 series card to any of the RTX cards until they get both games which can use its features and some decent testing results to see if these are really worth almost twice the price.