MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Lightning Z Review - Introduction

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Lightning Z 11 GB
Hydromatic - Ultramatic - Why it could be Greased Lightning!

We review the new MSI flagship graphics card, the mighty GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Lightning Z edition. This GTX 1080 Ti comes customized with high-factory clocks, a triple fan and cooler and a very impressive RGB setup. And it's a beast alright. The new card card comes with a three-slot cooler, remains passive up-to roughly 65 Degrees C and has a lot of hidden gems.

It is among the fastest graphics card your money can get you, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti based on Pascal architecture. Armed with 11 GB of GDDR5X graphics memory and an all new GP102-350 GPU, we are certain we're gonna break some records today. It has been eight months since Nvidia released the first GP102 based product, the Titan X. To date, a hugely impressive graphics card that will resemble what we review today and very similar on a lot of levels. Really, the 1080 Ti is the Titan X, just with one GB of that GDDR5X memory less and the one ROP partition tied to it. So let me break it down swiftly and quickly; the new high-end GTX 1080 Ti features 3584 CUDA Cores, 224 Texture Units, a 352-bit memory controller and 11 GB of faster (11 Gbps) GDDR5X memory. The card has the same "GP102" GPU as the TITAN X Pascal, but the GTX 1080 Ti was slightly reconfigured. Most interesting is the 352-bit wide GDDR5X memory interface, this was not expected. This translates into 11 memory chips on the card which run at 11 GHz (GDDR5X-effective), the memory bandwidth is 484 GB/s. This invokes the change in ROP count to 88 (from 96 on the TITAN X Pascal), and the TMU count of 224. The Pascal based unit is a bit of a beast alright, the GPU die size is 471 sq mm. If you look at the wider product stack, then a GeForce GTX 1080 has 2,560 shader processors, the GeForce GTX 1070 has 1,920 shader processors, the GeForce GTX 1060 has 1,280 of them. The Nvidia GeForce 1080 Ti has 3,584 shader processors active inside that GP102 GPU, I say active here deliberately as it still isn't even a fully enabled GPU. This means it is has 28 SMs active (28 streaming multi-processors x 128 shader cores (2x64). The cards will be equipped with fast GDDR5X memory as well for this 11 GB model. That memory is tied to a 352-bit wide bus locked in at 11 GHz (GDDR5X-effective). The combination of that memory type and clock frequency gives the 1080 Ti an effective memory bandwidth of 484 GB/s. 

Armed with bulky designed looks you will see a product today that has been overhauled and designed all custom with 14+3 power phases, that serious cooling system, factory tweaked clock speeds, back-plate and sure, configurable RGB LED lit activities up top and at the front-side. This Pascal 102 GPU empowered product keeps that unit at, or just under, the 65 Degrees C marker depending on game load. The card at defaults clocks in at a base clock frequency of 1582 MHz and a Boost frequency of 1696 MHz. The memory run an effective data-rate of 11120 MHz. The looks of the card are a bit deceiving . The card is all black, but that white lightning thing can be replaced with a different color sticker (supplied). Then the top and rear of the card have a very exquisite RGB LED solution that can be controlled by MSI Mystic light software. The cooling solution is called TRI-FROZR design with TORX 2.0 Fans and makes use of utilizes two 10cm and one 9cm TORX 2.0 Fans combining the advantages of both traditional fan blade and dispersion fan blade, generating large amounts of airflow while remaining silent. Two 8mm heatpipes transfer heat to the fins, enabling up to a whopping 700W of heat dissipation.

The card has several voltage monitor points and also a dual BIOS, a special LN2 BIOS on the card provides extreme overclockers more capability for overclocking records without the need for special hardware modifications. By removing restrictions, the full potential of the graphics card is unlocked. The card has a 10-layer PCB and is fitted with 14 phases for GPU and 3 phases for memory. The card is powered by a whopping three 8-pin power connectors.