MSI RTX Gaming X Trio 2080 and 2080Ti Review

Conclusion

The RTX 2080 and RTX 2080Ti in their Founders Edition form bring a lot of new technology to the party. Whether it’s the enhanced ray tracing capabilities of the RT Cores that give the cards their RTX name, or the inclusion of Tensor Cores, which work to deliver the best image quality with the help of Deep Learning, there is much to like about the Turing Architecture. Some of those benefits are for a little bit further down the road than we currently are, but it’s better to have the card and little to run on it, as otherwise, we endure the Crysis problem, where a game could release five years before PC hardware is fully capable of handling it.

If you have been sitting with a Maxwell or earlier graphics cards, and are patiently waiting to see what the latest GeForce offerings have to offer, then the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti are both more than worthy of a good look at. The RTX 2080 is like a GTX 1080Ti when it comes to traditional shading performance, but with some added bells and whistles attached in the form of RT and Tensor cores, whilst the RTX 2080Ti is all that you would hope from such a hefty investment, being one of the first – the first? – graphics card that let you play in 4K games without having to cripple your image quality to obtain great 60+ FPS frame rate. All of this is achieved without decimating the power efficiency of your system, and indeed both of the new cards draw a similar amount of power to the models they replace.

So we know the general nature of the performance you can expect from the new Turing GPU. What do the MSI cards, in particular, have to offer?

Firstly there is no doubting the size of these beasts. While nVidia’s Founders Edition models are a sleek two fan, two slot affair, the MSI Gaming X Trio is a triple fan monster, very nearly taking up three slots of PCIe space and with so many fins that even the dual tower 120mm CPU coolers are jealous. 

MSI have gone to great lengths to design the fins in a particular alternating wave pattern that they claim reduces noise while improving airflow, and we have to agree. Typically, three fans coolers are louder than two fan models for sheer air movement reasons, but the TORX fans on the Gaming X Trio’s are quieter than those on the nVidia Founders model, while also managing to keep it cooler under load. This change will, in turn, unleash more performance from GPU Boost 4.0 and Nvidia’s OC Scanner technology; even your manual overclocking efforts benefit from enhanced cooling. If you are the type of person who enjoys tinkering with their cards then you’ll be pleased to see how much power is available for you to play with. With an 8+8 on the RTX 2080, and a 8+8+6 on the RTX 2080Ti, we can’t imagine a scenario in which you’re left bereft of Watts with which to power your efforts.

MSI’s Gaming X shroud is also well designed, with the almost monochrome aesthetic with two red flashes around the nameplate. This design works well in conjunction with the Mystic Light RGB tech to look great in any modern setup. It both looks the part, and goes the part too, with the added tweaks MSI have implemented boosting the performance of both cards when compared to their nVidia equivalent. The performance of the Founders Edition – 4K excellence aside – was one aspect that we felt a tiny bit disappointed by, as the lower resolutions just didn’t tax the card enough to let it out-perform current models in current titles. The MSI refinements bringing a bit more oomph to the party are welcome then, but perhaps what is most appreciated is the very small price increase to accommodate them. We have seen the potential street price of other partner cards and winced slightly, but the MSI Gaming X Trio is only a relatively small increase over Nvidia’s Founders Editon models,  for which you will receive some very tangible benefit.

The improvements of the MSI Gaming X Trio in both RTX 2080 and RTX 2080Ti form give a much clearer indication of the direction nVidia are heading in with this new, complex PCB, and for that reason it wins our OC3D Enthusiast Award.

The MSI Gaming X Trio RTX 2080 is expected to retail for £814, whilst the RTX 2080Ti is £1159. 

 

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