MSI RTX Gaming X Trio 2080 and 2080Ti Review

Introduction

Today is the day that we can all finally see how good the new nVidia GeForce cards are, and whether our patience has been rewarded. It has been two years since the release of Pascal, making the launch of Turing highly anticipated, especially after the performance leap we have seen when moving from Maxwell to Pascal in 2016. We've already looked at nVidia's Founders Edition cards and found that the RTX 2080 is similar to the Pascal-based GTX 1080Ti in terms of raw performance, but with the addition of DLSS and RT cores adding a little secret sauce that has the potential to transform the card's performance in future games. Moving onto the RTX 2080Ti, the card is everything you would expect from a new flagship, albeit with a Titan-esque price tag.

No matter how much effort nVidia themselves put into the design of their reference cooler we know that for a lot of you the partner cards are the ones that will find homes in your systems, and indeed are the ones that you covet the most.

Whatever you may feel about other products in the MSI range, there is no doubting at all that their range of graphics cards have always been spectacular in performance terms, and cool and quiet with their Frozr cooler. Indeed it's from their Tri-Frozr cooler than this pair of cards gains their name, with both the 2080 and 2080Ti sporting three fans and a revised heatsink fin design to go along with their monochrome looks and RGB lighting.

But enough blather, you want to see them and we want to show them to you, so let's crack on. Have a tissue handy for page four though.

Technical Specifications

The main hardware is very much the same as that which we found on the nVidia RTX cards. Unlike the world of motherboards, there isn't a lot of room for partners to express their creativity. The one area MSI have found improvements is in the nature of the amount of power that can be delivered. The nVidia RTX 2080 and RTX 2080Ti had 8+6 and 8+8 pin PCIe power inputs respectively, whilst the Gaming X Trio are equipped with 8+8 and 8+8+6 pin inputs. Certainly, if you want to test your overclocking mettle and want to ensure that you have the maximum amount of power with which to do so, the MSI cards should be right up your alley.

RTX 2080 Gaming X Trio

RTX 2080 Ti Gaming X Trio