MSI RTX 5080 SOC Vanguard Review

Conclusion

Conclusion

We are never sure how to approach reviews such as this. Are we supposed to focus tightly on every tenth of a frame difference between cards? Or do we, instead, assume once you pass 100 FPS a few frames here or there make no odds? Would anyone suggest that the 427 FPS the Vanguard gets in F1 22 4K is much better than the 416 the Nvidia FE card got? Or much worse than the 442 FPS the ASUS Astral attained? We don’t think so, and if you say you can tell the difference just by looking then you’re a liar.

Obvious there are some benchmarks where the performance gap might be worth mentioning, but across the board we’ve found all the RTX 5080 cards to be very similar performers. Indeed the primary difference just seems to be one of price. There are power differences, and here the MSI SOC Vanguard scores highly, being the most frugal on your energy bills of the five cards we’ve tested. It is also, thanks to the famous MSI Cooler in place, the coldest card here. 63°C is well below even our psychological/noise threshold of 80°C, and 4°C below the coolest card until now, the Palit GameRock.

That massive amount of thermal headroom doesn’t appear to be utilised by the Nvidia GPU Boost technology. This is a card that definitely would benefit from some manual overclocking. With all that extra room to push the card harder and hotter, that might be enough to really take the performance to the next level. If we were cynical we might say that it doesn’t hit those performance heights to ensure the Suprim still has a space in which to fit. Maybe it’s just coincidental.

All in all the MSI RTX 5080 SOC Suprim does its job well. Best of all it leaves you two clear roads to take. Leave it as a cool, quiet, gaming behemoth. Or use those low temperatures to push the performance ever higher. For this freedom it wins our OC3D Gamers Choice Award.

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