MSI GTX1080 Gaming X SLI Review

Conclusion

The GTX 1080 is such an easy product to recommend. It’s got unbelievable amounts of performance married up to fantastic power efficiency. If you’re in the market for a new graphics card and have money to burn then you should buy one unhesitatingly.

When it comes to SLI though, the results are more complicated.

By virtue of the underlying GPU being so new, there will always be an adjustment period as the drivers get up to speed. It’s one of the things you have to accept with any new technology. Maturation is a key component. Unfortunately for our results this new GPU has appeared at the same time as many game developers are starting to get to grips with DirectX 12 and roll out either new games that take advantage of them or patching their old games.

This has meant a complicated set of results. As a general rule of thumb if you have an older DirectX 11 game then the MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X SLI will give you the kind of ‘call your partner in the room to show how high your frame-rate is’ experience that forumites love to brag about. If the game is more recent, and particularly if it has a DirectX 12 mode, then the results are more varied, and you need to accept that it’s currently in the early stages and hasn’t quite matured enough. But that’s a problem that always affects things on the leading edge of technology. It was a long while before every SSD did 550/550. It was ages before the many threads of our CPUs found applications to take advantage of them. So it will be with the GTX 1080 SLI.

But then if you have enough money to even consider buying two MSI GTX 1080s then you will understand the inherent issues that you’ll need to work through until nVidia’s drivers and the game developers catch up to the hardware. For the rest of us by the time we’ve saved up enough money to buy them, the software side will have matured enough that you’ll get insane performance no matter which title you throw at it.

It is utterly worth the few niggles though, as there just isn’t a gaming setup you can bring to the party which will out-perform the MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X SLI when it comes to providing buttery smooth gaming at 4K resolutions. In fact the more you pile on the resolution and image quality settings, the better the pair of MSI cards like it.

If you demand the very highest levels of performance, but at a power efficiency that won’t cause your electricity supplier to have to build a new substation just for you, then you have to have the MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X SLI in your system. Staggering levels of performance win it our OC3D Enthusiast Award.

  

You can discuss your thoughts on the MSI GTX1080 Gaming X SLI Review in the OC3D Forums.