MSI RTX 2080 Gaming X Trio Graphics Card Review

MSI RTX 2080 The new RTX graphics cards are here at last, and we follow up today with our second RTX 2080 series card! The rather stunning looking Gaming X Trio from MSI. With the 10-series cards, the Gaming X Trio was one of the fastest on the market. Obviously, both I and MSI are hoping to see that trend continue with the RTX 2080 I'll be testing today. Equipped with one of the flagship triple fan coolers, with Zero Frozr fan stop technology, as well as MSI TORX Fans 3.0. There's a new and improved radiator under the fans too, as well as more concentrated copper heatpipes, a larger copper-nickel base plate, and a "premium thermal compound" to keep everything running smoothly. With that in mind, if that card doesn't run cool, quiet and fast, I'll be raising an eyebrow with the MSI hardware design team. Of course, keep in mind that this card is being tested under our usual methods. RayTracing isn't available just yet, and DLSS is still being rolled out too. Even if they were here, since they're RTX only features, there's no basis for comparison in regards to consumer benchmarks at this time. We will retest in the coming weeks as these opportunities open themselves up to us though. RTX On! https://youtu.be/1IIiQZw_p_E 20-Series Features Geforce Experience Nvidia Shadow Play Nvidia Ansel DirectX 12 Nvidia G-SYNC HDR Ray Tracing Nvidia DLSS Specifications Core/Memory Boost Clock / Base Clock /Memory Frequency 1860 MHz / 1515 MHz / 7000 MHz 8GB GDDR6 TORX FAN 3.0: Supremely silent Dispersion fan blade: Steeper curved blade accelerating the airflow. Traditional fan blade: Provides steady airflow to massive heatsink below. Double ball bearing: Strong and lasting core for years of smooth gaming. Dragon Center 1 click to optimize all you need for smooth gaming. For in-depth specifications, please visit the official MSI product page here. What MSI Had to Say "The GeForce RTX 20 Series GAMING TRIO is the return of MSI’s beastly three-fan graphics card. Only reserved for the most powerful of GPU’s, the TRIO Series features a mix of black and gunmetal grey with elegant shapes and a classy brushed metal backplate that matches the front. This looks great with the gorgeous RGB effects found on the front and the side of the card, which can be controlled using MSI’s Mystic Light software and made to synchronize with other RGB components." - MSI What's in the Box Everything you need is packaged very neatly in this well-padded box. Including a GPU bracket and PSU adaptor cable. The bracket looks stunning and is perfect for adding a bit of flair, as well as preventing the card from warping or drooping; or indeed both. Also, the card comes well protected. However, some helpful stickers let you know that the NVLink is hidden behind a panel and that you shouldn't freak out if the fans aren't spinning; it's not a bug, it's a feature. A Closer Look It's clear that the Trio X is borrowing from the design of the old 1080 Ti model. However, it's a LOT more understated than it used to be, despite it still looking pretty extreme. Take a look at the old one and see what I mean. There are a few significant changes, such as the central fan is now larger than the outer fans, not smaller. Those cool but garish red highlights are gone; as they should be for a card with RGB anyway. Make no mistake though, this is every bit the monster its older brother is. The card is hefty, wide, long, and pretty damn heavy. There's a significant amount of metal in this thing, providing huge amounts of cooling surface area and strength for the PCB. I love how each fan has a shroud around it, perhaps they help channel the air? I think they're just aesthetic, and they do a fine job of that. TORX 3.0 Fans Each fan is packing a whopping 14 blade design, with extra notches on every second fan to further shape the airflow. As I said, there's some pretty serious metal work under here. The fin stacks are packed in tight and split into two main sections. The front section for the GPU core and memory, with the thinner (albeit still quite thick) second section covering power delivery hardware. Around the back, you'll find five connections to play around with; three DPI, one HDMI, and one Type-C VR connection. The length of the card is pretty significant, but no more so than most high-end cards these days. It uses a two-slot PCIe bracket, but as you can see, it comes in at 2.5 to 3 slots thick; which is again pretty standard these days. More Power! Power delivery comes from a pair of 8-pin headers, which may limit some older PSUs, but the adaptor cable is included in the box if you only have a single 8-pin header. On the rear of the card, you'll find this absolutely drop dead gorgeous brushed metal backplate. This may be the best-looking part of the card, and it just oozes premium quality. There's some ventilation, and of course, this adds rigidity to the card, as well as improving the cooling of the PCB behind it. Overall, this looks exactly as good as one could hope for from a premium gaming card. Now, how does it perform? Let's find out! How We Test Testing Procedure Here at eTeknix, we endeavour to disclose vital information regarding the benchmarking process so that readers can quantify the results and attempt to replicate them using their hardware. When it comes to our benchmarks in our reviews, the benchmarks are pretty self-explanatory although there are a few exceptions. Remember that your choice of graphics card, CPU, the silicon lottery, and other factors can yield different numbers, and there's always a margin for error when using any software. Therefore, your experience may vary. Testing Your Own System Links are provided below, as well as the settings we use. We encourage you to not just look at how one product compares to any other, but how it compares to your own. If you're looking to build a new system, you should benchmark your current PC using our benchmarks and settings where possible. You should then look at the percentage improvement from your current hardware to the hardware we tested to give you a ballpark figure of how much an upgrade this will provide you with. Graphics Card Test System Motherboard – Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 7 Z370 Processor – Intel Core i7-8700K @ 5.0 GHz RAM – Crucial Ballistix Gaming 32GB (4 x 8GB) 3000 MHz CPU Cooler – Noctua NH-D15S Power Supply – Be Quiet Power Zone 1000W Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Open Air Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 64-bit Additional Hardware Killawatt style electricity usage meter wall plug Precision Gold N05CC Decibel meter Gaming Any technology which favours either AMD or NVIDIA is disabled where possible. More specifically, this refers to PhysX, Hairworks and similar technologies. Additionally, we also disable all forms of AA, including FXAA, to gauge performance levels which aren't impacted by sophisticated AA wherever possible. V-Sync is always disabled in our testing, as is FreeSync and G-Sync technologies or similar. Graphics card power usage set to optimised or balance, and the system power mode set to High Performance within Windows and the available GPU driver software. Identical settings are used for all resolutions unless otherwise stated. Games and Settings Used Rise of the Tomb Raider (Steam) DX12 Medium Preset Pure Hair Off Deus Ex (Steam) DX12 Medium Preset Ghost Recon: Wildlands (Uplay) Medium Preset Turf Effects Off Far Cry Primal (Uplay) Normal Preset Software Used 3DMark Fire Strike (download) FireStrike (1080p) Benchmark Unigine Superposition (download) 1080p Extreme Benchmark HWMonitor (download) Noise Everyone has a reasonable noise level preference when it comes to comes to components on a computer. Some can handle all fans at 100% load to keep temperatures down; some want an entirely silent computer. To accurately gauge the noise output of a graphics card, we position a Precision Gold N05CC one meter above our open-air test bench and take an average reading at idle and load. Noise levels in your own system or an enclosed system will likely be lower than this. Power Consumption We take power readings during idle state with no background applications running. Then again at 50% completion of the Unigine Superposition benchmark, using the average as the final published result. Temperatures We take temperature readings after 10 minutes of desktop idle with no background programs running, then take the recorded maximum delivered from Unigine Superposition after a 4K optimised run, confirming the numbers are accurate with HWMonitor. Furthermore, the ambient temperature is always kept +/- 1c from 21c. 3DMark & Unigine FireStrike Straight off the bat, the Trio is no slouch, just edging a small lead out on the Palit Super JetStream RTX 2080. Still annoyingly behind that stubborn GTX 1080 Ti in both the 1440 and 2160p tests though. I am still adamant this is a driver issue and the 2080 series will pull ahead as they mature over the next few weeks. Don't worry, we'll retest in the coming weeks to see how things play out. What is important though is that the 2080 series cards are smashing well ahead of the older 1080 cards by a hefty margin. FireStrike Extreme FireStrike Ultra Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme Another interesting result here, with the RTX 2080 rocketing ahead of the GTX 1080 Ti by ya huge margin. Palit held the top spot here, but only by 16 points. However, MSI stole first place at 4K, which a staggering score of 9094 points; 87 points ahead of the Palit RTX 2080! Unigine Superposition 4K Optimised DirectX12 Gaming Benchmarks Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Again we see a similar pattern in our first gaming test. With Deus Ex, the 1080 Ti still pulled ahead for 1080p, albeit not by a huge margin. However, at 4K, it was the RTX 2080 Trio X that pulled ahead instead. It set our highest minimum and average scores and is also the first card to break the 60 FPS barrier in this benchmark. 1080p 2160p Rise of the Tomb Raider Rise of the Tomb Raider is a little easier to run, so hitting that 60 FPS target was a breeze for much older cards too. However, the 1080 Ti is still leading the pack for 1080p, that stubborn old power horse just won't go down, will it? But, ta-da back in at 4K it's the MSI card leading the pack, and even pulling ahead of the Palit RTX 2080 too. 1080p 2160p DirectX11 Gaming Benchmarks Far Cry Primal So now we turn our attention to DX11 based gaming with Far Cry Primal. There's really not much in it, with the Palit RTX 2080 and the GTX 1080 Ti scoring identically. MSI managed to pull a whole 1FPS lead, but nothing else of note there. At 4K it did fair better though, scoring a tasty 76 FPS. That's not much of a lead, but 2-3% faster is impressive for such similar cards. 1080p 2160p Ghost Recon: Wildlands The Palit took the lead here for average FPS. However, the MSI card looks more capable of holding a steady clock speed, as it set our highest minimum frame rate by quite a significant margin. This puts the new cards way ahead of the older GTX 1080 too and this isn't an easy game to run this well. What's most impressive though is that the MSI card took the top spot at 4K by 1 FPS, but slaughtered the Palit RTX 2080 when it came to the minimum frame rate. 1080p 2160p Overclocking, Noise, Heat and Power The latest card from MSI does come with a massive cooler and some increased boost clocks already. However, manufacturers always play it a little safe and like to balance the temperature and acoustic performance too. Throw that out the window and crank the fans a little, however, and there's usually a bit of horsepower left to safely squeeze out of the card. I managed to get a respectable 185 MHz increase on the core clock, just 3 MHz above that of the Palit RTX 2080. Interestingly, the memory also overclocked the same, adding +750 MHz. Of course, that's a big boost and a free one at that. Our original 3DMark score of 23581 saw a pleasant boost to 23600. Not massive, but faster is faster. Meanwhile, the Graphics Card went from 27962 to 28411. 3DMark Firestrike Acoustic Performance The MSI Trio X RTX 2080 features a zero RPM fan mode, so at idle, the card is completely silent; a trick the Palit didn't possess. However, with all three fans on the go, the card was practically silent at just 41 dBa, making it quieter than an MSI 1070 Ti! Once overclocked, the fans still were happy to idle at low load, and only increased by 1dBa at full load. Stock Overclocked Thermal Performance You would think with this cooler slacking off half the time and being so quiet, that it wasn't cooling that well. Of course, you would be wrong, and the card is the coolest high-end card we've tested. 63c at load is shockingly low and speaks volumes to the quality of that new cooler design. It got up to 65c once overclocked though, but still way below the 71c we saw from the Palit RTX 2080, or the 84c of the GTX 1080 Ti. Stock Overclocked Power Consumption As I said in the Palit review "there have been reports of these cards idling higher than Pascal chipsets and it appears to be a driver issue. We will revisit the RTX card testing in the coming weeks as drivers mature; these things happen pre-launch, it's to be expected. To be honest, if this is the only hiccup so far, then Nvidia has gotten off pretty easy." That still seems to be somewhat true, with higher than expected idle power. We present the results regardless and look forward to testing them again soon. Stock Overclocked Final Thoughts How Much Does it Cost? Right now, the MSI Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 8GB Gaming X Trio Turing Graphics card is available for £815 at most retailers. That's pretty competitive given it has one of the best coolers we've ever tested for any GPU. Not only that, but it's also pretty competitive for the RTX 2080 series in regards to pricing, especially given the features. Sure, the GTX 1080 Ti is a thorn in its side, currently, you can get a high-end one for around £100 less. Of course, we've yet to see the full potential of the new architecture and its features, so only time will tell which one is better value. Overview RTX has landed with an impressive set of benchmarks this week. Sure, the public reaction has been mixed, and I'm more than well aware of that. However, most of that seems to be down to the price. When it comes to the hardware though, I can't help but love the technology here. The non-Ti version of this generation is on par with the Ti version of the last gen for starters. However, this card runs cooler, quieter, and has a bunch of extra features on top. Albeit, they're features that are yet to be unleashed. RTX and DLSS Nvidia has created a solution to a problem that doesn't exist yet. The developers of the world can't build games with ray tracing and DLSS without the hardware, and gamers can't play the games on the hardware without both. They say good things come to those who wait and I expect they will. We've seen this before with 4K, with HDR, with PhysX. The hardware comes first, then the software filters in and with DirectX updates from Microsoft next month and games currently being updated to add these features, the RTX series still has a lot of tricks up its sleeves. Early adopters pay a premium, and that is clearly the case here. However, if you want to enjoy the ride first, you have to buy the ticket. Performance The Palit card we tested was no slouch, but the MSI has it licked in more ways than one. When it came to 1080p performance, this card can keep up with the best of them. However, it was at 4K that it really got into a good stride. The sophisticated cooling and power delivery helped this card maintain its boost clocks more consistently. This resulted in some of the highest minimum and average framerates we've ever seen at 4K. For the enthusiast gamer, this is great news. Of course, the 2080 Ti will go further still, but perhaps the RTX 2080 is better positioned for gamers due as it's a few hundred quid cheaper than the Ti model right now. Should I Buy One? While you can get the GTX 1080 Ti right now for £100 less, at least if you're shopping for a high-end custom and overclocked model like the Trio X, why would you? Short of saving money, obviously. This new chipset is more efficient, runs cooler and quieter, and has a bunch of cool features on top. DLSS and RayTracing are welcome additions, but even still, with a few driver updates, I'm confident the Turing chipset still have a lot of untapped performance. We'll be retesting as new features and drivers roll out, and I expect we've all got a few good surprises to come from that. Right now, the Trio X is the card at the top of my own shopping list to upgrade my now quite old (in tech terms) GTX 1080.