MSI GeForce GTX 1080 GAMING X PLUS 8G review - Product Showcase

Product Showcase

Let's start with our photo-shoot. A few pages that show the ins and outs with photos, all taken with an in-house photo-shoot of course.
  

So for the MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X PLUS MSI just re-used their Gaming X version, You will spot a nice matte black PCB with 10-phases and two power headers (one 8-pin and one 6-pin) for a bit of tweaking headroom. The PCB is as mentioned matte black in color, and of course the TwinFrozr revision VI cooler is being used. 

As board partners are allowed to release the 1080 model cards in their own configurations you will see many versions, mostly based on customized PCB/component and the obviously mandatory different cooling solutions. This is the X PLUS edition of the Gaming series, meaning it has high but not the highest GPU clocks and a back-plate, all quite impressive as well. The PLUS relates to faster memory, this is clocked at 11 GHz effective data-rate on the memory.

The card itself is a dual-slot solution, it is composite heat-pipe based, the GPU is cooled by a nickel-plated copper base plate connected to Super Pipes (8mm heat pipes) on this MSI GAMING series graphics card. A SU heat pipe layout increases efficiency by reducing the length of unused heat pipe and a special SU-form design. Zero Frozr technology eliminates fan noise in low-load situations by stopping the fans when they are not needed Up-to roughly 60 Degrees C, the fans won't even spin. The LEDs embedded in this graphics card can be controlled with the MSI Gaming APP, though we haven't tried it (due to lack of time) these are RGB configurable with a few animations as well.  Check out the backside where there is a thick sturdy metal back-plate with plenty of venting spaces applied as well. 

The card will have a power design of roughly 180 Watts, but due to the high clocks and extensive tweaking design please add maybe 15 extra Watts. Two power headers in combo with component selection like Hi-c CAPs, Super Ferrite Chokes and solid capacitors should be plenty for a nice tweak as well. The GeForce GTX 1080 is DisplayPort 1.2 certified and DP 1.3/1.4 Ready, enabling support for 4K displays at 120Hz, 5K displays at 60Hz, and 8K displays at 60Hz (using two cables). This model includes three DisplayPort connectors, one HDMI 2.0b connector, and one dual-link DVI connector. Up to four display heads can be driven simultaneously from one card. The GTX 1080 display pipeline supports HDR gaming, as well as video encoding and decoding. New to Pascal is HDR Video (4K@60 10/12b HEVC Decode), HDR Record/Stream (4K@60 10b HEVC Encode), and HDR Interface Support (DP 1.4).