Gadgetory

msi gtx 1080 gaming x is one of the first 1080 aiv partner cards we've received after the founders edition or reference card as we are trying to revert to calling it now so this is the gaming X this is the middle of MSI stack above this is the gaming Z and then they've got some cards below it as well so this is the middle it is priced at 720 dollars which puts it above the founders edition cards which are $700 and above several of the other competing cards including semi referenced cards from MSI that are priced in the six hundred dollar range so this is pretty high up there in terms of price but we're here to review it today test the performance thermals noise overclocking all that stuff and see how it does the GT X 1080 gaming X operates at three different clock rates our review model shipped at a stock clock rate of 1847 megahertz which falls under Emma size OC mode you might need to install the MSI software to toggle these modes and see comparable results but basically there's a step-down mode which is gaming mode at 1822 megahertz boosted and then silent mode at 17 33 megahertz boosted which runs a lower fan speed now there was some discussion over the last few days about Asus and MSI cards shipping at these highest OC settings that they have and potentially having custom v bios for reviewers i'm not 100% sure if that was the case here i do know for 100% certain that I did ship at that OC mode sort of preset clock rate but that's something you could do as well so I'm not going to not going to go on a rant about that because there's no need to you can basically install the a the the suite for MSI's cards and then set it to OC mode and you'll have the same clock rate that we have on this thing for our tests here so the gaming X has an extra 6 pin power header and that puts it up to a total power allowance of 300 watts if you can actually hit that with the V bios limitations the voltage or voltage limitations and in terms of V bios we were told by MSI detects that these cards have a custom v bios with additional over-voltage we'll test that in the overclocking section but it should have a custom v bios and then the card itself is very obviously a non reference PCB because it's it's quite large so this part right here the expansion slot is exceeded in height by the actual PCB and the cooler and this is something that just as a brief aside does really annoy me with these cards because they are unnecessarily tall and it's kind of annoying to work with SLI configurations or just install and some systems it will not work in a lot of Mini ITX cases as a result and the height is really just unnecessary once you tear this thing apart and I think that's maybe a way of reducing PCB thickness or something going with a higher taller board instead but that's one small thing here in terms of the rest of this it does have a 10 phase powered design so the V RMS got ten phases significantly better than the five plus one of the reference design from Nvidia this is running the twin frozer six cooler from MSI which is brand-new for this generation we talked about in a previous video but it's got six heat pipes they are eight millimeters and that's most of the cooling and the rest is done through these to push fans which push dissipate the heat out pretty standard stuff but it does reduce thermals pretty significantly over that reference design so for the benchmarks will start with thermal performance since that's the most noteworthy with an AIB partner card and then we'll dive into noise fps overclock and all that stuff keep in mind that we don't publish all our data in these videos for time reasons but check the article linked in the description below to find all the gaming benchmarks so for thermals MSI's Twin Frozr 6 as I said has eight millimeter heat pipes six of them that feed into the cold plate the aluminum heatsink has a heat dissipated through the to push fans and then those are capable of operating at zero rpm where the temperatures are below 60 C or when the watt draw is below a certain number msi calls this zero frozer and as of the silence option of the card rather than the performance option and the feature can be disabled if you prefer just run better thermals the aftermarket cooler pushes the GTX 1080s thermals down to 45 point 3 Celsius delta T / ambient and that's running the higher clock rate as well so we've already put ourselves in a good position here the difference is a full 12 Celsius delta T versus the reference design which is 20 2.75% if you convert it to a percent difference the idle temperature runs higher on MSI's card but the increase is negligible and really not noticeable at all to a user other than the fact that the fans are running at zero rpm so it's got a couple degrees warmer idle for a much lower load temperature and for better silence during the low load times this is a serious improvement over the reference design which had a thermal wall of 82 Celsius that's absolute naught Delta so that would put you in the 60s or so for the Delta metric but eighty-two Celsius was the thermal wall at which point we saw some pretty heavy throttling on the clock and that's resolved by these aftermarket coolers which is something we proved before these are even out by building a custom 1080 hybrid using the 980ti hybrid solution from EVGA and then throwing it onto a 1080 so we already showed how that works and this is a further proof of concept where we're not hitting that endurance limiter here's a look at our noise at testing chart where we have decibel levels of this cooler against the founders Edition cooler and other products but if you want to read specific analysis on noise check the article and we also have test methodology there for you now note that while doing this noise testing we did observe some coil wine when overclocking but it was nothing that would be troublesome if the card were installed inside of a case and an open-air bench though it was a little bit noticeable frame rate on the MSI GTX 1080 gaming X is unsurprisingly improved over the reference card running the clock rate at its OC mode which is the default mode our review sample is running at produces reasonable gains / reference but we were expecting a lower price than reference and that's not the case so the argument is definitely a little more difficult to make when the card is part tired despite being overall better the value is muddied patched that's $700 mark anyway let's go to FPS tests so first of all the tests for FPS are in the article below but we'll start off with GTA 5 which shows a minimal FPS gain with the MSI gaming X flavor of the GT X 1080 when playing at 4k we're seeing a gap of 2 FPS or 4.0 2% and at 1080p so driving 4k that translates to a 3.5% Delta which again not very impressive but still we're already reasonably ahead of the reference card in FPS and well ahead of it in thermals and noise in some ways so not terribly noticeable but not terrible either black ops 3 posts the 1080 gaming X at 211 FPS average for 1080p high settings which is really only reasonable if you're trying to hit 200 Hertz for some reason and that's a 9 FPS gain over the FE card or 4.5% and at 1440p that gain is somewhat carried with 140 FPS for the gaming X versus 135 point three for the reference card or about a three point four percent delta 4k has us at seventy one point three fps verses 68 FPS on the reference card and that's a 4.7 percent delta so we're in the three to five range overall for black ops 3 and in the 3 to 4 range percentages for GTA 5 shadow of mordor at 1440p puts us at 108 FPS the pre OC gain and that's a one point eight seven percent climb over the FE card at 4k we're seeing a couple FPS gained that amounts to about a four percent John 10 performing overall and again as with the previous ones that none of this is overall impressive but somewhat expected for what is effectively at factory overclocked GT X 1080 the differences should shine most and thermals and noise though and theoretically in overclock II but we'll get to that soon like previous titles ashes of singularity is showing more or less identical performance between the cards the 1080p high test has the gaming X are just barely over 1 FPS ahead of the EFI card for dx12 that is outside of margin of error but it is pretty close to margin of error dx11 has us within 0.5 FPS difference not percent FPS at 4k high with ashes we see a couple FPS gained with the gaming X but it is again more or less inconsequential at a 6.0 to % Delta for K crazy shows a bit more difference and seems to be hinging on the clock rate more heavily than the previous cards is because it's becoming GP throttled and that posts a delta of 12.6% difference between DX 12 tests on the F II and the gaming X cards that Delta is 7.1 2 presents when running DX 11 instead this thing we had a maximum core clock resting at 20 50 megahertz all totaled and the memory clock was 54 54 megahertz and that's an effective of almost 11 gigabits per second the power target on this card maxes out at 107 percent so it's a lower power target percentage than the founders Edition card but the power design is much different so it's not necessarily a one-to-one linear comparison in that regard I mean we've got an extra power header so that is the limit on power it's 107 percent of what this board can provide the vcore stops at one point zero six two volts and that seems to be a hard limit because when we hit the forty percent offset for voltage it was not any different than when we went 50 60 70 percent of whatever is all 1.06 2 volts so here's a look at our chart showing the stepping for this video card and overclocking it you can see the passes and fails of different endurance or brief initial tests showing our final clock rate of 20 50 megahertz and then here is a look at our GT X 1080 reference or founders edition results where we settled at about 20 25 to 20 30 megahertz somewhere in that range and the GN hybrid our custom liquid solution that uses an EVGA 980ti hybrid cooler but on the 1080 that we built managed to pull off 21 64 megahertz max so keep in mind that these are real tests we could push these clock rates way higher if we just ran fur mark or something and did synthetic tests like you'll find in some places but the problem with these synthetic tests is they often load the GPU in one way very specifically and maintain that load throughout the test so you don't have this fluctuation in the clock rate like you do with real gaming where the GPU will throttle back when it's not necessary or push harder when there is a really complex geometrically intense scene or something like that so you don't see that with synthetic testing that's why we use these games fire strike is a good alternative for kind of live overclocking just figuring stuff out and these results are what with the card similar to this one at least given variances for the the silicon lottery they are representative of what you will achieve for a real gaming scenario basically a 20 50 megahertz output and then here is the FPS differences in the charts now overall you'll see a couple percentage points difference at best from the OC mode and our manual OC and that's really about what you would expect for this type of overclock so overclocking it wasn't really that exciting it wasn't bad it was still a twenty to twenty five megahertz increase over our founders edition testing but in no way is that worth another twenty dollars what is worth another twenty dollars though is the substantially improved thermal solution this thing brings you down twelve Celsius that puts you way below the eighty-two Celsius wall where there's throttling and that's the next important point is that even though the gaming X doesn't overclock in its core clock significantly higher than the founders Edition the endurance testing is much better and this is something that we just started doing recently we will run an endurance test to see how well a clock rate sustains over time as he generates so it does resolve some of that thermally we saw about a 25 percent improvement in temperatures noise is reasonable it's effectively zero DB output when running below 60 Celsius if you have that Abell the zero frozer technology that they've got in here which is really just a fan throttle that most these cards have these days and then in terms of overclocking itself the gaming actually marginally improves over the founder's edition this seems to be more of a limitation with Pascal than with say MSI so this is really a thin on Pascal slash Nvidia where there's maybe a V bios or voltage limitation or some other kind of wall where it's very difficult to get these things over 2100 or even at 2100 megahertz of the exception being our hybrid where we did some special tuning but in general that seems to be about the limit I'm not clear yet if that's because of volatility of the FinFET process or what's going on there but that does appear to be about the limit on these cards FPS 1.8 percent to 12 percent better with overclocking depending on what game generally about 5 percent average improvement for overclocking and the card itself ignoring overclocking so thermals are good we've said noise is reasonable the price I am NOT a fan of I don't think that $700 is a good price for the 1080 in general and 720 I really don't think is a great price so right now most of these cards are $1,000 on Amazon I'm saying this one specifically I'm saying all GTX 1080s you can find today are 800 to a thousand dollars which is insane do not pay that amount of money for for the 1080 that's just a supply and demand thing it will calm down prices will fall they always do so hopefully the 720 kind of drops below the reference price as things normalize but I wouldn't be a buyer at this price right now I'd want it to at least be 700 if not slightly lower next thing this is certainly much better than the reference design it's got a better power management setup oops a better power management setup it's got two times the phases for the GPU and although the clock rate is capped around the same loose stability is better now one thing I'd really like to see MSI improve on is the height of the cards I know they're doing this whole gamer thing but this is just it's just too tall I don't know that it needs to be maybe a thicker PCB would resolve some of this but the height is an issue for many ITX builds it's obnoxious for SLI if you're trying to mix and match cards which whatever you shouldn't do but I mean people do it and it's just unnecessary so that is one thing I like to see improves but they're not alone here at gigabyte does the same thing and it drives me crazy but that that's how it is it's a very small complaint in terms of what you should buy I would suggest waiting right now because the markets about to flood with 1080s from all these different vendors and EVGA has got their hybrid coming out we've heard rumor that should be 700 dish or below below this maybe is a possibility if that is the case be a very serious thing to consider FTW is also coming from EGA that's air cooled and then gigabytes got the g1 gaming which is cheaper than this I believe from memory that one is in the 650 range and then the extreme gaming one is in the 680 range so those would be worth considering as well the issues Strix will be cheaper than this as well so depending on what you want it's worth looking around waiting for more reviews and honestly none of these are really available at their advertised prices right now anyway so it doesn't do harm for you to just relax take a few weeks research these things see what's going on now as far as when they will it be available at reasonable prices we've heard through board partners not MSI specifically but through others to expect sometime in the next month that's supply and demand that may stabilize and that's when you'll see the prices kind of hit where they should be so you've got a good month to research things and figure it out if not potentially more but that's it that's what I got for you having trouble hitting 20 100 megahertz on any of these liquid notwithstanding in our special test as always patreon link post roll video if you want to helps out directly subscribe for more of this content because there's a lot of it I'll see you all next time