MSI GTX 1080 Ti GAMING X Review

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Conclusion

Conclusion

Unless any of the AIB GTX 1080 Ti cards are bursting into flames or something, we surely will be recommending them. Like it or not, the GeForce 1080 Ti series deliver incredible amounts of RAW game performance. At a MSRP of 699 USD for the Founders Edition you are going to notice that the board partner cards will not be far off. Expect prices in the 750~800 USD and Euro ranges. Now sure, that is an incredible amount of money to play games, but yeah once you have one of these puppies in your PC, you'll forget about that pain you had to caugh up instantly - as this product series simply delivers. In the Founders Edition review I stated that the cooler is not enough for the beast inside. It throttles (albeit within advertised specifications) and is a bit on the noisy side. The advantage of the MSI Gaming X edition is that it is neither. I mean it is silent and not throttling since the temperatures are under control. So all lights are green on this one, pardon the pun. So the board partner SKUs are all clocked faster compared to the reference (founders edition) products. overall you are looking at another 5% on average extra in performance and another 5% by tweaking it yourself. And that means the product as tested today passes Titan X performance levels. So in retrospect the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti simply is a beast and probably the ultimate card series to get for an enthusiast class gaming PC. But please keep in mind that if you purchase this card you must game at 2560x1440 or Ultra HD or multi-screen, as otherwise the money would not be well invested. This is a true enthusiast class card, and your PC kit needs to match.

 

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 Aesthetics

MSI kept the Gaming X (and Z) series style in tact, the stylish TwinFrozr VI cooler looks serious and comes with RGB LED lighting control. It (I feel) however is time for MSI to move on-wards to other designs. Aside from small tweaks these cards are starting to look too similar. Even something as simple as a color change would help, imaging this card in all black? And yes, we have seen Titanium colored editions in the past as well, so my comment here is not 100% validated. But a bit of an aesthetic change would do this series good. There are RGBs LEDs on the card, Switch it on/off or to any color and animation you prefer, the choice is yours. Cool dibs is that backplate, with opening at the proper areas (GPU/VRM) for venting. As you can see, I remain skeptical about backplates, they potentially can trap heat and thus warm up the PCB. But the flip-side is that they do look better and can protect your PCB and components from damage. Consumer demand is always decisive, and you guys clearly like graphics cards with backplates. Both the front IO plate and backplate are dark matte black which certainly gives the card that premium feel. All that combined with a nicely design 8+2 phase PCB again in matte black, and the end result is a lovely looking product.  


Cooling & Noise Levels

The reference design (founder editions) of the GTX 1080 Ti are set at an offset threshold of 80 degrees C and easily hit 84 Degrees C under load/stress. As such the reference cards, once the GPU gets warmer, will clock down on voltage and base turbo clock to try and keep the card at that temperature threshold. That throttling and it part of the design. This is not a problem for the MSI card, as they throw roughly 600W of cooling performance onto the GPU, memory and VRM area. History has proven that this concept works and is a really good one, so good that up-to a degree or 60 on the GPU this flagship card remains passive and thus inaudible. Once the fans kick in, you can expect to hover at the 65~70 Degrees C marker, with seriously demanding games. Please do note that you will need proper ventilation inside your chassis to achieve that number. So MSI shaved off a good 10 Degrees C over reference. Noise wise, we can’t complain about cooling whatsoever. Expect sound pressure values in the ~38 dBA range at max under load and warm circumstances. That's measured 75 CM away from the PC. This means you can barely hear the card while using it. Once overclocked you could add voltage and here we always do recommend a little more fan RPM, this does increase noise a tiny bit, but it's nothing dramatic by any standard. Overall this is a very silent and solid cooling solution. We did hear a tiny bit of coil-noise on this product, not much or anything annoying enough. We doubt you can hear it in a closed PC chassis.


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Power Consumption

The GP102-350-A1 Pascal GPU is rated as having a 250 Watt TDP, our measurements show numbers slightly above that being closer to 300 Watts. Keep in mind that this is a peak maximum value under full stress. At this performance level you are looking at 500 Watts for the PC in total, that is okay. We think a 600~650 Watt PSU would be sufficient and, if you go with 2-way SLI, an 800~900 Watt power supply is recommended. Remember, when purchasing a PSU aim to double up in Wattage as your PSU is most efficient when it is under 50% load. Here again keep in mind we measure peak power consumption, the average power consumption is a good notch lower depending on GPU utilization. Also, if you plan to overclock the CPU/memory and/or GPU with added voltage, please do purchase a power supply with enough reserve. People often underestimate it, but if you tweak all three aforementioned variables, you can easily add 200 Watts to your peak power consumption budget.

Gaming Performance

From 1080P to Ultra HD the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti shows some serious numbers. But here's a paradox - the more difficult things get - the better the product will perform. E.g. Ultra HD is its true domain. Much like fine wine that ages well, that means this GeForce GTX 1080 Ti will last you a long time with future more GPU intensive games. This much performance and 11 GB of GDDR5X graphics memory helps you out in Ultra HD, DSR, VR and hefty complex anti-aliasing modes. That and of course the latest gaming titles. I consider this to be a very viable single GPU solution that allows you to game properly in Ultra HD with some very nice eye candy enabled with a single GPU. Drivers wise we can't complain at all, we did not stumble into any issues. Performance wise, really there's not one game that won't run seriously well at the very best image quality settings. Gaming you must do with a nice Ultra HD monitor of course, or at least a 2560x1440 screen. Now, we can discuss the advantages of that 11 GB frame-buffer, but hey, you can draw your own conclusions there as performance isn' t limited. And with 11 GB of it, you won't run out of graphics memory for the years to come, right? So in that respect the card is rather future proof.

Overclocking

The boost modes can be configured with temperature targets relative to maximum power draw and your GPU Core frequency offsets. Saying that I realize it sounds complicated, but you'll have your things balanced out quite fast as these products are easy to tweak. This GPU can take a rather hefty Boost clock, once tweaked (start with +50 MHz on the GPU and a maxed out power limiter) and you'll see your games rendering in the 1900~2000 MHz domain. The memory you'll be able to get close to roughly ~12 GHz for an effective data-rate. For a GPU with 12 Billion transistors, you've gotta be at least a tiny bit impressed, right? With our tweak we averaged out at a ~2 GHz boost frequency, but had to increase fan RPM to prevent it from throttling down.

Concluding

MSI went full circle with the Gaming X edition of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. All boxes are ticked and everything was done right. The GP102 GPU is a beast, a wolf in sheep's clothes even as the more difficult the rendering scenario gets, the better it starts to perform. And herein also is a Guru3D recommendation to be found as obviously if you game at 1080p, forget about it and get a 1070 or 1080. At 2560x1440 the card really kicks in and at this resolution the 1080 Ti actually makes a lot of sense as it has heaps of power and memory hence. It is going to last you a long time. Really, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is that Wolf Titan X in disguise. Nvidia had to do something to it and decided to ditch 1GB of memory, bringing that VRAM number to a weird 11GB. This means slightly fewer ROPs and a rather unusual 352-bit memory bus as well. But then they do use faster DDR5X memory and slightly faster than Titan X clock frequencies. So the performance drop is immediately annihilated and in fact the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is as fast or sometimes even faster compared to the Titan X (Pascal). You've seen the numbers, for Ultra HD gamers and even 2560x1440 gamers this product works out well, really well. Overall we are impressed by the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, very much so. Compared to the founders edition from Nvidia this product has improved on performance with roughly 5%, it has low noise levels and nice cooling levels. A handy side-effect here is that the card will not throttle down. The price obviously is the one thing that remains a bit of an icky thing to talk about, but as always this is Nvidia's fastest consumer based GPU for the masses. If you can afford it, we can definitely recommend it. The MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X is ticking all the right boxes, yet again.

If you are interested in an FCAT Frametime analysis of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, please read this article.

 - H


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