MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Lightning Z 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.
  

The product will start selling soon for roughly 799 euros, in the USA you are looking at or just over 749 USD. The card has very nice looks with that dark and lightning bolts design (customizable btw) and LED lighting. The card is based upon a nice matte black PCB and gets 14 phases + 3 for memory - and uses three (!) power headers (8-pin) for a little more overclocking headroom. 

As board partners are allowed to release the 1080 Ti model cards in their own configurations you will see many versions, mostly based on customized PCBs/components and the obviously mandatory different cooling solutions. The Lightning Z Edition has nice clocks and a backplate, all quite impressive as well. The card has default OC mode clock frequency of  1696 MHz (boost) / 1582 (base) MHz with 11 GB GDDR5X / 11,120 MHz effective data-rate on the memory. 

 
Looking at the rear side you'll see the Lightning designed backplate. The backplate does have some vents. The card itself is triple slot solution. With only 2-way SLI available these days, the size got less important we feel, so we are okay with that. The cooling system is based on a stacked 3x fan system. In low-load situations the fans do not spin. Thus up-to roughly ~60 Degrees C the fans won't even spin. At the backside you will see large Lightning logo,above it the lightning bolt is a multi color RGB LED stripe. 

The card will offer five display connectors; you'll spot two DisplayPort connectors, two HDMI connector and a DVI connector. That does mean there is little ventilation available as rear exhaust. DisplayPort is 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). The card 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 Ti 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).

We'll get the the customization stickers in another chapter but included as well is a nice black three slot PCI-Express slot cover you can install on the graphics card if you'd like that. Nice.