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MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G Review

editors choice horizontal
4.0
Excellent
July 12, 2016

The Bottom Line

MSI's GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G is a well-built, blistering video card that's hard to fault for any modern demand: 4K gaming, VR. Our only quibble was availability at this writing.

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Pros

  • Runs cool and quiet.
  • Better performance than the GTX 1080 Founders Edition.
  • Mature software.
  • Snazzy RGB lighting.

Cons

  • At time of review, hard to find.
  • Not quite as fast as Zotac's top GTX 1080 card.
  • One LED is locked on red.

To understand how a company like MSI produces a graphics card like the GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G ($719.99), it's helpful to understand how Nvidia has changed its strategy of launching new video cards. In fact, when Nvidia launched its all-new "Pascal" graphics-card architecture recently, it adopted a novel, if somewhat head-scratching, strategy that differed from all previous launches.

Typically, on the launch of a given new graphics chip, Nvidia would send what's called a "reference design" card to reviewers, so that they could test the graphics card in stock trim, with nothing fancy added and no major overclocking pre-applied (or optimized for) in the cooling hardware. It's essentially like sending a car reviewer the base model of a car to review.

Once that process is complete, and the reviews are posted, the actual consumer usually gets to select from a smorgasbord of different versions of the video card designed by Nvidia's add-in board (AIB) partners. These boards can either be very similar to the reference design, at least in terms of clock speeds, or differ dramatically by including exotic cooling, custom circuit boards, and more. When you line up all these boards, the result is a continuum of pricing and options, from bare-bones cards that sell for MSRP to overclocked, hyper-cooled boards that sell for $50 to $100 more than MSRP due to their extra performance and hardware.

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That's the old model, and it worked fine. But here in 2016 with Pascal, Nvidia decided to flip the status quo. It is still offering a reference design, but it has renamed it the "Founders Edition," and these cards are selling for a premium over the cards from its partners. It sounds counterintuitive, but this is how Nvidia is doing it this time around. It also means we've already reviewed the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition ($549.00 at NVIDIA) , and now it's time to begin examining cards from its partners, starting with this swank MSI Gaming X card.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Front View)

Under this new arrangement, the first thing to cover when discussing any of the video cards from Nvidia's AIB partners is how the card differs from the Founders Edition. It's generally a given that the cooler will be different, as the Founders Edition uses a very distinct cooler that's unlike anything else on the market (which can be a good or bad thing, depending on your needs and tastes). The Founders Edition uses what's called a "blower" cooler, called that because it sucks air into a channel and then pushes it over a large heat sink on its way out of the chassis through the rear. This type of design is good at lowering temperatures inside the PC case, since the hot air is exhausted out the back of the PC.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Box- Front)

This MSI card uses a different cooling configuration, like many AIB partners do. Here, MSI uses a dual-fan setup that has graced all its high-end cards, including its GTX 980 Ti, going back a few years. It's called the Twin Frozr, and on this card the company is up to version VI. It uses two special fans that each have two types of blades: one to increase airflow, and one to push the air down into the aluminum heat sink below. MSI claims this combination is good for a 22 percent increase in air pressure over a traditional fan setup. The card has a nickel-plated copper baseplate that sits on top of the graphics processor (GPU) and absorbs its heat, then transfers it to heat pipes that carry it into the heat sink, which is in turn cooled by the fans that sit on top of it. MSI also uses double ball bearings inside the fan cylinder, which it says reduces noise and increases longevity.

If you're curious to see how the Twin Frozr VI cooler on the GTX 1080 looks compared to the previous-generation cooler, we just happened to have them both in the same place for a side-by-side comparison...

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Comparison)

As you can see, they look practically the same from the outside. (The GTX 1080 is the one up top.)

MSI has also tried its best to make this version of the GTX 1080 as quiet as possible, so it has tuned the fans to not move at all (a state called, cheekily, "Zero Frozr") when the GPU is below 60 degrees C, which should be any time you're not gaming. Once the temp rises above 60, the fans get to work.

Since it's 2016 and such things are inevitable, the MSI Gaming X now has RGB lighting, too. An MSI logo on the side of the card is always visible, as well as individual stripes on the "top" face of the card, which are not visible when the card is installed. You can change each zone individually or all of them together, and have them be static, animated, or turned off.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Light Up Logo)

Since the Gaming X has such a beefy cooler, predictably MSI has pre-overclocked the card a bit, too. You can either attempt to overclock the card yourself via its software, the prosaically named "MSI Gaming App," or just select one of the overclocking presets it provides. (More on that thorny issue in the Performance sections coming up.) There are two presets for overclocking, named "OC" and "Gaming," plus one for Silent. The Silent mode leaves all the clocks in their default state, which is 1,607MHz base clock and 1,733MHz boost clock. Punching up Gaming mode boosts the base clock to 1,683MHz, and the boost clock to 1,822MHz. The highest state of tune is the OC mode, which sets the base clock at 1,708MHz, and the boost clock at 1,847MHz.

It's also possible to boost the card beyond these numbers using MSI's excellent Afterburner utility, which has been a staple of the overclocking community for years and is well-regarded on the whole. The card itself could also run at higher speeds than those determined by the presets, if it thinks there's enough power and cooling to do so, which is the beauty of Nvidia's GPU Boost software.

Like all the other GTX 1080 cards, the GTX 1080 Gaming X comes with 8GB of GDDR5X memory. GDDR5X is a faster version of the memory that's been used in video cards for the past few years. It runs at 10Gbps, whereas the normal stuff runs at 7Gbps, max. Connectivity, in contrast, is standard here; the Gaming X offers three DisplayPort connectors, one HDMI 2.0 port, and one dual-link DVI port

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Ports)

The GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G comes with a three-year warranty and has been tagged with a $719.99 MSRP by MSI, though that price is something of a phantom, as we couldn't find one of these cards in stock anywhere from a U.S. retailer at this writing in early July 2016. A listing in a price search engine for Newegg seemingly confirmed the $719 figure, but when we clicked on it, the item was out of stock, which was broadly typical of GTX 1080 cards as we wrote this. It's not clear if it's limited supply or overwhelming demand, but we suspect a bit of both.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Back)

With the details of the card out of the way, let's take a closer look at the included software.

Software

Video cards are rather like solid-state drives (SSDs) in one sense: Most include software that you could easily neglect to install and yet be just fine. (So long as you install Nvidia's or AMD's universal drivers for the card, of course.) You would need to install software to overclock the card, but again, that might not interest everyone. MSI's software for that, MSI Gaming App, takes much of the guesswork out of overclocking for you, though, and it also provides some handy utilities. Let's examine each one, shall we?

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Gaming App)

The main window of the app shows the current clock speed, and which overclock preset is being used. As mentioned earlier, "Silent" is just default clock speeds, and it is indeed silent. We mentioned the clock speeds utilized by each preset above, and they work on the fly, too, so you can adjust them mid-game if you want. Even at its most aggressive, which is OC mode, we found the card running at 1,923MHz boost clock at times, which is 190MHz over the speed that the Founders Edition card is supposed to deliver. That's pretty decent.

It's true, however, that a lot of Founders Edition cards can go beyond even that speed, but you'd have to overclock them manually, as Nvidia doesn't supply software that offers overclocking presets like this. Overall, we found the one-click overclocking in MSI Gaming App to work perfectly, and just clicking the OC button took us about 90 percent of the way home in terms of the final overclock we were able to achieve with manual tuning (more on that later).

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Eyes)

The icon that looks like an eye (at the top of the MSI Gaming App software's window) opens up an assortment of "media types" that adjusts your screen's color cast to make certain types of media consumption more enjoyable. EyeRest, Movie, Gaming, and Customize are the options, but since we actually use our monitor for professional photo editing, we didn't touch any of these in regular use. We did tinker with them, though, and they make the display brighter, warmer, or cooler according to what MSI thinks is best for movies versus gaming, and so on. A lot of monitors include these types of controls in their onboard software, but changing the screen color here is a lot easier than fiddling with a monitor's onscreen controls and buttons, that's for sure. Though we didn't use this particular feature extensively, it could be useful for some people.

Next, the silly-fun stuff: card lighting!

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (LEDs)

Here's where you can adjust the LEDs on the Gaming X board. You can control two of them: the LED-lit MSI logo on the edge of the card with a tiny dragon, and light strips that surround the fan closer to the end of the card. Because in most PC cases they will face downward, those stripes are only partly visible when the card is running, and not as visible as we'd like. They do emit a hazy glow into the bottom of your case if there's nothing below the video card.

We actually had trouble—or what we thought, at first, was trouble—with this software. We were able to change the color of the logo on the side of the card but not of the stripes. Eventually, we figured out that only the logo allows for RGB color changing, while the light strips around the fan are locked to red. We found that an odd decision. You get the freedom to change one light to match your case's color theme but not the other set, so they may clash and be a terrible faux pas at those modding-themed dinner parties.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Top View)

Joking aside, MSI offers a set of animations you can select, and you can sync the two lights, so if you select breathing or flashing mode, both lights will be doing it in coordination, which, admittedly, looks pretty cool. One interesting feature that is listed as an animation is named "Music," and when enabled, the lights on the fan will flash in time with whatever tunes you are playing. Finally, if you're not into the lighting aspect, or if your PC is in the same room as your bed, you can turn the lights off.

Next is one of the coolest features of the software, and one we've wanted for a long time now.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (OSD)

This panel lets you display your system's GPU and CPU characteristics onscreen as an overlay, so you can see how hot the card is, what its clock speeds are, and so on in real time. When we first selected this option, it said it was only available in certain games (it shows you a list of them) but we found it worked perfectly in the unlisted Battlefield 4. So your results may vary.

The last icon in the MSI Gaming App is a snowflake, and there's no resulting screen for it because it just ramps up the fans for a brief period to cool things off. We're not sure why you'd need this, or would activate it, since after it's done the GPU goes back to the same temp it was at before. But if you want a brief cooling boost for whatever curious OC experiments you may have been engaged in, it's there.

MSI also includes its popular Afterburner utility for overclocking, and we used it to overclock the card beyond what was possible via the presets.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Overclock)

This utility is easy to use, but we don't like that it doesn't clearly display the card's current clock speeds—just the amount of offset you or the Gaming App have applied. To see the whole number, we had to enable the OSD mentioned above. It would be helpful if the real-time clock showed up in the utility itself.

Performance

Things are in some flux these days when it comes to testing video cards, as there are two emerging technologies that this card was built for that are difficult to test. The first is DirectX 12 (DX12), which is just now gaining momentum. There are relatively few real-world benchmarks for it. Still, DX12 will likely be the standard graphics API in the future, and this card was designed to last for at least a few years. So it's important to know if a card can handle DX12 well before buying.

We tested the GTX 1080 with several recent DX12-capable games we had on hand, including Hitman (the 2016 edition), Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Ashes of the Singularity. We tested a load of games using DirectX 11, too, because that API will still be in wide use for at least another year, and probably much longer.

The second technology that's difficult to test at present is virtual reality, or VR for short. The GeForce GTX 1080 was built to run VR twice as fast as its predecessor, and in all the launch presentation documents Nvidia specifically referred to the card's VR performance, as that was what the company wanted to highlight. However, there are two major competing VR headsets, in the form of the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, with more coming to market soon, and it's difficult to establish a lone test that is applicable to all scenarios.

Steam has its own VR benchmark, but at the time of this writing, it didn't output anything beyond a "Fidelty Score" and a vague "Not Ready," "Capable," or "Ready" indication. That said, since the baseline recommendation for both the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift is a Core i5 processor and a GeForce GTX 970 graphics card, the GTX 1080 and the Core i7 CPU in our test bed would easily pass this test.

Futuremark is also working on an upcoming VRMark test, but it was only in beta when we wrote this, and it refused to run on our test bed, even after making sure the benchmark was up to date. We'll have to wait for future, finalized VR benchmarks. But if you're considering buying a GTX 1080 primarily for VR, you can rest assured that current VR-ready games and those launching in the near future will run on this card just fine. It well exceeds the minimum recommendations.

Note that we tested this card in OC mode, as indicated in the MSI Gaming App. MSI shipped this review card preset to OC mode, though note that retail cards come preset to Gaming mode. Retail buyers have to install the Gaming App and click the OC mode button to activate it. We opted to test in OC mode and not downclock the card, as engaging it involves almost no additional effort, and it ran perfectly stable in all our tests. We also suspect it's the big reason a buyer pays the extra for an AIB card like this one in the first place, rather than opting for a reference/Founders Edition.

3DMark (Fire Strike)

We started off our testing with Futuremark's 2013 version of 3DMark, specifically the suite's Fire Strike subtest. Fire Strike is a synthetic test designed to measure overall gaming performance, and Futuremark has expanded Fire Strike nowadays into three subtests. In the past, we used the basic test (known simply as "Fire Strike"), as well as the more demanding Fire Strike Extreme test. But these GPUs are so powerful that we had to move up to the most punishing test, Fire Strike Ultra, which is geared toward simulating the stresses of gaming at 4K.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Fire Strike Ultra)

In our first test, we see that the MSI card is indeed faster than the GTX 1080 Founders Edition, which isn't terribly surprising since it costs a bit more and is higher clocked. It's pleasing to know that money isn't being wasted, though, as Nvidia made it sound like its version of its GPU would be just as fast as, if not faster than, its partner boards. We also see in this test that the highly clocked Zotac board is the fastest outright.

Tomb Raider (2013)

Here, we fired up the 2013 reboot of the classic title Tomb Raider, testing at Ultimate detail and three resolutions.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Tomb Raider 2013)

This chart is interesting in that we see a 3fps difference among all three GTX 1080 cards, showing a clear hierarchy. It's also a moment for us to step back and ponder the fact that we've wanted to be gaming at 4K resolution running 60fps but haven't been able to—until now, that is. All three of the GTX 1080 cards can get there even at Ultra settings in this demanding game, which is impressive. We see the MSI card clipping the Founders Edition by 3fps, and itself being outranked by 3fps by the Zotac Amp Extreme.

Sleeping Dogs

Next, we rolled out the very demanding real-world gaming benchmark test built into the title Sleeping Dogs...

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Sleeping Dogs)

At this point, it's fair to say we're seeing a pattern emerge, which is that the MSI card is just a tick faster than the Founders Edition, while the Zotac is slightly faster than the MSI card. This test bears that out, at every resolution.

Bioshock Infinite

The popular title Bioshock Infinite isn't overly demanding, as recent games go, but it's a popular one with stellar good looks. In its built-in benchmark program, we set the graphics level to the highest preset (Ultra+DDOF)...

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (BioShock Infinite)

In this test, the MSI card was neck and neck with the Founders Edition at 4K, but it took a small lead at 1440p and 1080p resolutions. Though the frame rates may seem like overkill, the GTX 1080 is definitely well suited to running games at over 144Hz, as those monitors are just now coming out. It is a bit pricey to just play at 1080p, but you'd certainly have smooth frame rates!

Hitman: Absolution

Next up was Hitman: Absolution, which is an aging game but still pretty hard on a video card. (Coming up, we also have testing in the 2016 reboot of Hitman.)

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Hitman- Absolution)

In this test, it was essentially a three-way tie among all the GTX 1080 cards. They are all extremely close on this test, none holding a meaningful lead at 4K or 1080p. The Zotac Amp Extreme did pull away at 1440p, however, taking a solid lead.

Far Cry Primal

Ubisoft's latest open-world first-person hunting game is one of the most demanding titles we use, thanks to its lush foliage, detailed shadows, and otherwise incredible environments.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Far Cry Primal- Ultra)

Looking at the results, it's fair to say that on this one, all the GTX 1080 cards are basically even in terms of performance, with differences small enough to make little difference. For example, in this test the MSI card is just 2fps faster than the Founders Edition at 4K, which is essentially a tie. Oddly, the Founders Edition was actually faster at 1080p this time around, which seems like an anomaly since both the Zotac and MSI card performed exactly the same at this lower resolution. It's also interesting that Primal only runs at about 80fps at 1080p on a $700 video card; this is one demanding game!

Ashes of the Singularity

Oxide's Ashes of the Singularity is a bit of a departure as a benchmark, as it's a real-time strategy title, rather than a first-person shooter or a third-person action title. Due to the planet-scale nature of its battle scenes, with hundreds of onscreen tanks, ships, and other implements of future warfare, it can be extremely demanding at high settings. And because of the plethora of rendered units, this game is also more CPU-bound—especially at high settings and resolutions—than most other recent games.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Ashes of the Singularity- DX11 Crazy)

The GTX 1080 is so much faster than every other card currently on the market it makes comparisons a bit difficult, since there is no comparison. Compared to AMD's flagship GPU, the Radeon R9 Fury X, for example, the MSI GTX 1080 is 10fps faster at 4K, which is an absolute smackdown. It's also interesting how close all the scores are on this test regardless of resolution; this game is well known to be CPU-bound, as this test draws hundreds of objects on the screen at once. (Our test-bed PC is no slouch, either, built around a 4th-Generation "Haswell" Intel Core i7-4770K.)

Grand Theft Auto V

As one of the most popular game franchises on the planet, Grand Theft Auto really needs no introduction. The fifth "V" installment took a lot longer than many expected to land on the PC. But when it finally did, in early 2015, it brought with it a number of graphical improvements and tweakable visual settings that pushed the game far beyond its console roots.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Grand Theft Auto)

It's a bit boring at this point comparing the three GTX 1080 cards, as they are so close on each test that you could cover all three of them with a small bathroom towel. It's notable that the GTX 1080 is the first GPU we've seen that can run this game at 4K and 60fps, which is quite an achievement. For what it's worth, the MSI card was a smidge faster than the Founders Edition card in high-res, but not quite as fast at 1080p.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Lara Croft rises once again in the early 2016 iteration of Square Enix's long-running action franchise. As our hero works to unfold an ancient mystery (and reveal the secret to immortality) ahead of the ancient and deadly Order of Trinity, she traipses through a slew of complex atmospheric environments, from arid tombs to the frigid Siberian wilderness. A dynamic weather system, and the complexities of Lara's wind-tousled hair, add to the game's visual complexity.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Rise of the Tomb Raider- DX11 Very High)

The GTX 1080 testing hierarchy held here, with the Founders Edition/MSI/Zotac stair-stepping upward in increments of about 4fps to 5fps at the resolutions that matter.

It's tough to get any real sense of DirectX 12 performance at this point. When we wrote this in early July 2016, only a few titles were available with DirectX 12 support. And running these games, anecdotally, we saw no graphical differences between the titles running at DX11 versus DX12 settings. In some instances, titles running under DX12 offered performance gains, but elsewhere we saw lesser performance.

In other words, any conclusions you might draw about DX12 in general from the below results should be taken with a Gibraltar-size hunk of salt. DirectX 12 is still in its early stages, and those developers who have implemented it have yet to throw on the spackle and smooth over the cracks. We'll have to wait at least a few more months to say for sure how much of an advantage DX12 offers, and whether it sways things in favor of AMD or Nvidia in any substantive way. Still, because this is a cutting-edge card and DX12 is cutting-edge tech, it's worth taking a look at what the GTX 1080 and its competition can do with Microsoft's latest gaming API today. On to the DX12 tests.

Rise of the Tomb Raider (Under DX12)

This sequel to 2013's Tomb Raider is one of the first AAA titles to offer DirectX 12 support. We used the preset labeled Very High for testing.

Rise of the Tomb Raider (Under DX12)

In DX12 tests, we finally begin to see a bit more of a meaningful separation between the GPUs. The MSI card ended up running about 10 percent faster than the Founders Edition in this test, which is significant. It maintained that level of performance at all resolutions, too, keeping its distance from the Nvidia-designed card. Once again, the Zotac card was indeed faster than the MSI card at the two key resolutions (1440p and 4K).

Hitman (2016, Under DX12)

The newest Hitman title also offers up a DX12 graphics option in its benchmark which, like Rise of the Tomb Raider, looked identical to our eyes to the DX11 version.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Hitman (2016)- DX12 High)

Though the MSI card ran dead even with the Founders Edition at 1080p in this test, it pulled out a sizable lead at the more important 1440p and 4K resolutions. In both tests it was, once again, about 10 percent faster than the reference design, which is a testimony to MSI's engineering. And, of course, the Zotac card was also a teeny bit faster than the MSI card once again.

Ashes of the Singularity (Under DX12)

The strategy title Ashes of the Singularity was among the first to offer DirectX 12 support, even when it was still in beta. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it was also the most stable DX12 test we ran, never once crashing, locking up, or noticeably glitching when we ran it multiple times on a handful of high-end cards.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Ashes of the Singularity- DX12 Crazy)

Once again, we see the MSI Gaming X putting up a decent performance boost over the GTX 1080 Founders Edition, somewhere around 10 percent. That's quite impressive considering they are the same GPU, and Nvidia put a lot of effort into the cooling apparatus of its card. After all, the Founders Edition is not a traditional bare-bones reference board but a well-designed, well-cooled $699 GPU, much like the MSI card.

The DX12 tests seem to scale very well, too, as the MSI card holds its advantage at all resolutions. It's worth noting, too, that at 4K, the Zotac card and the MSI card are evenly matched.

Overclocking

When we tested the Founders Edition of this GPU, we were able to squeeze a decent overclock out of it, pumping it just a bit above 2GHz, which is about 300MHz over "stock." With the MSI Gaming X's beefy cooler, we hoped we'd be able to juice it a bit above that level, but we could not.

We increased the card's power target as high as it would go, up 121 percent, then began nudging the GPU's clock-speed offset first, then the memory-speed offset. We increased the numbers until we began to see artifacts on the screen, then backed it down a bit. We ended up with a final clock of 2,025MHz, and a memory speed of 1,184MHz.

Overall, this isn't too shabby, but based on what we saw with the Founders Edition, it's about average for a GTX 1080. We have yet to achieve what Nvidia showed at the Austin, Texas, launch of the card, where it was running at 2.1GHz. When overclocked and under full load, the card ran at 71 degrees C, which is excellent as it was also barely audible. In our estimation, this card overclocks well, and yet still runs cool and quiet. MSI has done an excellent job with this card's acoustics and cooling.

Conclusion

When Nvidia launched the GTX 1080 Founders Edition, it said it was a "premium product" and that it would have an MSRP that was higher than the cards produced by its partners, at least in theory. This led a lot of us in the tech media to wonder what exactly the partner boards would be like, and whether they'd all be cheaply made knockoff boards with the Founders Edition being the only truly premium card on the market.

Now that we've had some hands-on time with the MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G, we can see that's clearly not the case. Though Nvidia has attempted to flip the status quo around this time, the situation in respect to reference designs versus partner AIBs remains the same as it ever was in the past—or at least it does with the MSI card. It's faster than the Founders Edition and also runs quite cool, and so seems more highly refined than the Founders Edition. Then again, since it retails for $719, you are paying for this extra bit of engineering elbow grease.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8GB (Box- Back)

In terms of performance, there's nothing to complain about here. The GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G was faster across the board than the Founders Edition, and it looks much better in our opinion, too. We also enjoyed the ease of the MSI Gaming App; it brings useful tools to the table, including the onscreen overlay of system stats (GPU temp, clock speeds, and the like), and we liked having the ability to change the color of the side LED.

It does seem a bit quirky to have the LED around the fans always remain red, though. It reduces the point of changing the color of the other LED. Typically, when people build systems for appearance, they use one color, be it red, white, or green. That generally looks best. We would almost prefer had MSI just left everything red. As it is now, it's confusing to see marketing talk about customizable LEDs and then learn that some of them are always going to be red, no matter what.

That gripe aside, this is really a top-notch card from top to bottom. It runs cool and quiet; it has great software and features; and though we couldn't overclock it beyond what we got with the Founders Edition, we have a feeling most GTX 1080s will end up in the same rough 2GHz-max range since that's what we've seen thus far across the tech press-o-sphere. Reports of cards running beyond 2GHz are rare, so we don't blame MSI for not being able to achieve that.

When compared with the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Amp Extreme, though, it's a tough call. Both cards are priced the same ($719.99 MSRP), and neither was widely available as of press time, so any putative price differences are speculative. However, both cards have advantages and disadvantages. The Zotac card was a tad faster in our tests, but not enough to make any seriously appreciable difference in most games, so that's not a huge consideration. The MSI has RGB lighting on its side LED, and the Zotac card has lighting too, but only seven colors. Both overclock well, and both run cool and quiet, though the Zotac card, size-wise, is a 2.5-slot hulk, whereas the MSI is a more typical two-slot-wide card. They are both outstanding cards, and you can't go wrong with either, we think. The MSI card does offer a better software package, however.

All in all, the MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G is a very well-rounded package that does everything we want a high-end GPU to do these days. It's just a shame that, here in July 2016, it's still so hard to buy one.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G
4.0
Editors' Choice
Pros
  • Runs cool and quiet.
  • Better performance than the GTX 1080 Founders Edition.
  • Mature software.
  • Snazzy RGB lighting.
View More
Cons
  • At time of review, hard to find.
  • Not quite as fast as Zotac's top GTX 1080 card.
  • One LED is locked on red.
The Bottom Line

MSI's GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G is a well-built, blistering video card that's hard to fault for any modern demand: 4K gaming, VR. Our only quibble was availability at this writing.

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