Performance Analysis

The performance results are in no way surprising, with the MSI GTX 1080 Ti Lightning Z dominating practically every chart, usually with a slight edge on the other GTX 1080 Ti cards there. It has absolutely no issue maintaining high clock speeds under load. In its default Gaming Mode, it was running at 1,949MHz constant, and this was increased to a sustained 1,974MHz in Lightning Mode. It offers pretty much the best single-GPU gaming experience currently available, although the same is true of virtually any overclocked GTX 1080 Ti – the observable performance differences between them will always be very small. Regardless, it's a very satisfying set of results.

Power consumption is on the high side, even relative to other GTX 1080 Ti cards. However, if you're in the market for this type of card, that's probably the least of your concern.

The cooler may be massive, but it does a brilliant job of keeping things cool, and a delta T of 41°C is fantastic and considerably lower than examples from Palit and even MSI itself. Better yet, it's also able to stay quiet – regardless of what performance mode it was set to, the fans were spinning at about 1,550 RPM after a sustained period of load, which was only just audible. That said, during the initial minute or two of load, we observed a brief but very obvious spike in fan speed. Initially, we thought this was something that needed fixing, but MSI has confirmed that it is indeed the intended behaviour of the card, and it's done mainly as a means of quickly clearing dust that may have accumulated on the fins and blades as well as to warm up the ball bearings inside. We still think it would be nice to have it as an optional fan profile or something that only happened every so often instead of during every session, but at least it's not a fault with the card or VBIOS.

Overclocking only allowed us to squeeze out between three and seven percent more performance, but given that the core already runs at nearly 2,000MHz out of the box, we weren't expecting much more. Truth is, you'll need to resort to more extreme cooling methods to see higher numbers; thankfully, the MSI GTX 1080 Ti Lightning Z is built to allow you to do just that.

Conclusion

Limited to 3,000 units and costing almost £950, this is clearly a very niche product. Reserved solely for those into record breaking or with very deep wallets, this is a flagship graphics card through and through. It does absolutely everything right, letting you tweak away to your heart's content while also blasting our frame rates that'll make the rest of us jealous. We know the size will be off-putting to some of you, but beyond that it has everything an enthusiast looks for in a card and more. It's the sort of product most of us wish we could own, but if you happen to have the cash to make that wish a reality, we're sure you'll love what you find.