MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G - A Totally Silent GTX 1080

Introduction

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 launched like a robot into the atmosphere, taking off and selling out in more than one country, with it being the most-wanted video card right now. In our review of the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition, I praised its various feats like the 16nm FinFET process, the new Pascal architecture, and the use of GDDR5X clocked at 10GHz. It was something I referred to as the Holy Trinity of technology, which allowed NVIDIA to created a video card that offers virtually the same performance of two GTX 980s in SLI. Impressive, considering it has a single 8-pin PCI power connector and consumes far less power.

Well, MSI is a company that we've all known and loved for performance hardware, especially when it comes to video cards. MSI has been famous for its pre-overclocking range of video cards, with most of them cooled by their Twin Frozr technology. The new GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G has the latest Twin Frozr VI cooler, which keeps the card cool enough through anything we threw at it that it's silent during even after long periods of heavy gaming.

With an overclocked GPU, additional 6-pin PCIe power connector, and better cooler, MSI's GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G should be somewhat of a bump in performance against NVIDIA's own GTX 1080 Founders Edition, right? Well... that's something you'll have to see with our benchmarks, and final thoughts.

The First of a Wave of New GeForce GTX 1080s

Keep in mind that this is one of the first custom GeForce GTX 1080 cards after NVIDIA launched its own GTX 1080 Founders Edition a few weeks ago. The GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G won't be the best offering from MSI, with a future Lightning branded card to be expected, which should be one of the best GTX 1080 cards if MSI can really push the GP104 and GDDR5X to their limits with some crazy power requirements. But the performance will be oh so worth it.

Armed with the default 8-pin, and backed by an additional 6-pin PCIe power connector, we have much more power to play with when it comes to overclocking and the cooling performance. But is the performance there with the stock overclocking? What's the card like when it comes to thermal performance, and how loud it is under 100% load? This is where MSI shines with the GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G, with a card that performs better than the Founders Edition - even if it's just by a bit - but is completely silent under load; that's impressive.