MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G Review

Performance Analysis

The GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G is neck and neck in performance terms with the EVGA GTX 1080 FTW, trading first and second place with it throughout the course of our benchmarks depending on minimum frame rate variation. There is no significant difference at all between these cards in performance terms.

Relative to other cards, the GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G is, on average, 22 percent faster than a GTX 1070 Strix, 35 percent faster than a reference GTX 980 Ti and 31 percent ahead of AMD's closest rival, the R9 Fury X. In none of these cases does it offer good bang for buck, but that's not what the GTX 1080 is about.


What it is about is being the fastest single GPU card around. Our results show that the GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G is a seriously potent weapon for 1440p gaming – it's smooth in all our benchmarks, normally with minimums above 60fps (though not always). At 4K, it's a solid performer too. Still no card is yet able to play all games at this resolution with every single detail at maximum, but an overclocked GTX 1080 like this is the best you can currently do.

The boost speed observed was dependent on the mode we used. As mentioned, for the bulk of our testing we ran the card in the full-speed OC Mode, where it was most commonly hitting 1,924MHz. This dropped to 1,898MHz and 1,823MHz in Gaming and Silent Modes respectively. These differences are very small, and a bit of testing demonstrates this nicely – between OC and Gaming Modes, there is less than 0.01 percent difference in the Unigine Valley scores, and even between Gaming and Silent mode it's still under 2 percent. These are not deltas that you'll be able to notice with the human eye in-game.


Similarly, there was less than 10W difference in power consumption between the fastest and slowest modes when we ran our load test, and likewise the temperature was the same every time and the fan speed always ended up at around 1,300 RPM. Basically, there is no reason to get fussed about differences between the modes, and little reason not to just use OC Mode all the time.

We should point out that EVGA's GTX 1080 FTW card does seem to have an efficiency lead on this card, which consumed at least 20W more in our tests. On the flipside, however, MSI is able to keep the GTX 1080 GPU 4°C cooler, and the Twin Frozr VI cooler was always extremely quiet – you can game in near-silence with this card if the rest of your system is similarly tuned.

With the GTX 1080 Gaming 8G overclocked, system power consumption rose a little to 416W, and we saw a 6-7 percent uplift in average frame rates, which is right in line with our 6 percent overclocks. Again, this posed no real trouble for the cooler.

Conclusion

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G is a highly desirable card. It's built with the world's fastest gaming GPU at its heart, and you get both a core and memory overclock to boot as well as a fantastic cooler with very low noise operation, cool temperatures and the ability to switch off when idle. The RGB LEDs add a bit of extra pizazz, and the backplate is another welcome addition. There's even a bit of extra headroom for further overclocking, assuming you're not too unlucky in the silicon lottery.

Power consumption spiked to a little higher than we'd have liked, and we'd prefer it if MSI was able to keep the RGB and mode switching controls within Afterburner rather than a separate application. In fact, we'd prefer it if the modes didn't exist at all and the card just shipped in OC Mode and that was that – there's really no tangible difference between them in performance, heat, noise or power consumption, rendering them mostly pointless. As you can tell, we're getting very nitpicky here, but you are shelling out almost £700 for this card. The price really is quite insane, and there are better value GTX 1080s, and definitely better value cards out there (even the GTX 1070 counts in this case), but if you're already shopping for a GTX 1080 then value for money was probably forgotten about long ago. If that's you, we really have very little negative to say about the GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G.