MSI GTX 1080 Ti GAMING X TRIO Review

Looking for the ultimate GTX 1080 Ti? We take a look at what is probably the last custom design for NVDIA’s flagship graphics card in the GTX 10 Series – boasting a factory overclock and triple fans!

Product on Review: GTX 1080 Ti GAMING X Trio
Manufacturer & Sponsor: MSI
Street Price: UK £750 US $800

Released all the way back in March of this year, the GTX 1080 Ti has become the common choice for avid gamers. It isn’t difficult to see why this GPU has fast become a firm favourite, the sheer horsepower is undeniable and certainly in the high-end arena, there is nothing from AMD which comes remotely close to NVIDIA’s 16nm powerhouse.

While it might be late to the party, the graphics card we’ll be analysing today seeks to drive down noise and temperatures. In the spotlight today is the MSI GTX 1080 Ti GAMING X TRIO; a flagship graphics card boasting triple fan cooling via the Tri-Frozr thermal solution. MSI has also armed this offering with three factory overclock profiles – Silent Mode, Gaming Mode and OC Mode.

Will this late arrival be able to gain much traction? Let’s find out!

About MSI

As a world leading gaming brand, MSI’s goal is to become the most trusted name in gaming and e-sport. We’ve dedicated countless hours and committed numerous resources to the eSports community to support the world’s most aspiring and best gamers and use their knowledge and expertise in our products in return. The insistence on 100% in-house design and manufacturing gives MSI the solid capability to implement innovative ideas and optimized design in our products.

Technical Specifications

Below are the technical specifications surrounding GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X TRIO, supplied directly by MSI:

GPU
GeForce® GTX 1080 Ti
CUDA cores
3584
Video Memory
11GB GDDR5X
Memory Bus
352-bit
Engine Clock
1683 MHz / 1569 MHz (OC Mode)
1657 MHz / 1544 MHz (Gaming Mode)
1582 MHz / 1480 MHz (Silent Mode)
Memory Clock
11124 MHz (OC Mode)
11016 MHz (Gaming Mode)
11016 MHz (Silent Mode)
PCI Express
3.0
Display Outputs
2x DisplayPort 1.4
2x HDMI 2.0b
1x DL-DVI
Recommended Power Supply
600W
DirectX
12 API feature level 12_1
OpenGL
4.5
Cooling
Triple Fan – Tri-FrozR
Slot Size
Double slot
Supported OS
Windows 10 / 8 / 7
Card Length
325 x 140 x 48 mm
Accessories
6-pin to 8-pin power cable x 1
Graphics Card Support Bracket x 1

Detailed Look & Video Review

For this review we’ve produced a video review over on our YouTube channel which details all of the included features, and takes a close look at the PCB/cooling solution along with the addition of some gaming benchmarks. Please check out our video review or hit play on the video below:

Test Setup & Methodology

How we test graphics cards

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphics card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

Hardware

Taking Intel’s High-End Desktop platform, our hardware utilises the Intel X99 chipset. Combined with this we use the Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to a realistic and achievable 4GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB (4x4GB) of DDR4 at 2666MHz and a 750GB SSD there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

High End Graphics Cards on test:
MSI GTX 1080 Ti GAMING X TRIO
ZOTAC GTX 1080 Ti MINI
AORUS GTX 1080 Ti XTREME
NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti
AORUS GTX 1080 XTREME
GIGABYTE GTX 1080 G1 GAMING
ZOTAC GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme
ASUS STRIX GTX 1080

Special thanks go to Epiphan, Intel, Corsair, MSI and AOC for providing the extreme spec components used for our test bench:

Motherboard: MSI X99A Workstation
CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition @ 4GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair LPX Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 2666MHz 16-17-17-35 C1
Power Supply – CORSAIR HX1050
Hard Drive – Samsung 840 EVO 750GB
Cooler – CORSAIR Hydro Series™ H105 240mm Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
Monitor – AOC 28″ 4K U2879VF
Capture Card – Epiphan AV.io 4K

Benchmarks
If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we’ve chosen:

DOOM (OpenGL 4.5 & Vulkan)
Total War: Warhammer
Rise of the Tomb Raider
HITMAN
DiRT Rally

To capture framerates we use a combination of in-game benchmark tools, FRAPS and PresentMon.

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included three of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:

Unigine: Valley
Unigine: Heaven 4
Futuremark 3DMark Firestrike
Futuremark 3DMark Time Spy

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Power, Temperatures, Acoustics

To test for power consumption, we take a measurement from the plug socket. It is important to note that the figures below represent total system power use and not just the GPU. The CPU was always in a fixed state (4GHz overclock) so did not affect the additional power load when the GPU was placed under 100% load using Heaven 4.0 which was ran for 20 minutes at which point a load reading was taken. Idle readings were taken 5 minutes after system boot to ensure any background services and applications had loaded.

Temperature

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests we set Heaven 4.0 running continuously for ~30 minutes recorded the peak/maximum GPU temperature.

Acoustics

MSI set out on a mission to create a low-noise solution in the TRIO, and they definitely achieve this. The card is very quiet, even when fully loaded using the OC profile.

Overclocking

To overclock the TRIO we used the MSI Afterburner Tool since it gives extensive options for modifying the GPU and memory clock.

We were quite surprised by this graphics card as, beyond the OC profile, we were able to bump up the frequencies even further.

Our best overclock saw us reach 1787MHz on the GPU boost clock and 1407MHz for the memory. Giving both of these attributes a nudge up translated to a decent performance increase in Rise of the Tomb Raider – as shown below.

DX12: 3DMark Time Spy

With its pure DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, 3DMark Time Spy is the ideal benchmark for testing the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards.

DX11: 3DMark FireStrike

Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is Futuremark’s most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.

DX11: Unigine Heaven 4.0

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms.

DX11: Unigine Valley

Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.

DX12: DOOM OpenGL 4.5

By default DOOM utilises an OpenGL 4.5 renderer, and is one of relatively few Windows PC titles to not use DirectX 12. It tests how well NVIDIA and AMD’s GPUs deal with a less mainstream approach, especially in regards to driver optimisations, and like all of id titles stretches graphics quality to the limit.

DX12: DOOM Vulkan

id have also released an optional Vulkan rendering path for DOOM. This API is a development of AMD’s Mantle low level which has been taken on board by the Kronos Group for implementation as the next generation of Open graphics APIs. Like DirectX 12 Vulkan is capable of Asynchronous Compute in specific configurations.

DX12: Total War: WARHAMMER

Total War: WARHAMMER is a pseudo Real-Time Strategy title which leverages DirectX 12 to render huge numbers of complex units on screen at any one time.

DX12: Rise of the Tomb Raider

Square Enix’s Rise of the Tomb Raider is the sequel to 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot. An enormously challenging title graphically, the developers also released an optional DirectX 12 render path for Windows 10 users. Although it has undergone a number of iterations this rendering pathway notably doesn’t currently utilise the full capabilities of DirectX 12.

DX12: HITMAN

Yet another DirectX 12 title, 2016’s Hitman from Square Enix and developer IO Interactive has a more robust DirectX 12 implementation than Rise of the Tomb Raider. We’ve tested at a full range of resultions, from 1080p through to 4K, which provides a look at the impact of GPU speed and memory utilisation.

DX11: DiRT Rally

Overall Performance

Here we take a look at the overall performance of the graphics card. This figure is determined by finding the average FPS across all of the settings used in a particular benchmark(game) to give us an overall value.

Value For Money

We make a simple calculation for this set of results. For each game we add all of the resulting FPS totals together and then divide by the four sets to give us an overall performance figure. While the figures alone do not give you an accurate picture of how the card will perform in any given scenario, they do tell you, when averaged, which GPU is the more capable across all of the benchmarks and settings tested.

Conclusion

Adding a GTX 1080 Ti to their portfolio some 10 months after the initial launch may seem like an odd move by MSI but they’ve definitely pulled this one off.

The innards of this graphics card are based off the GAMING X, while adopting the thermal excellence of the Lightning. The eagle eyed among you will notice the Lighting has actually been removed from MSI’s product listing and in most countries this graphics card is now EOL. That is because GAMING X TRIO will replace Lighting and claim the top spot in MSI’s lineup.

By adding in a triple fan configuration and utilising a revised heatsink using 6-copper heatpipes results in some rather impressive thermal results. The Twin FrozR design has been the go-to solution for GPU cooling and the Tri-FrozR design only serves to improve this.

As we can expect, the GTX 1080 Ti is already a well-established GPU in its own right and GAMING X TRIO has no problems handling the latest gaming titles, even when the resolution is ramped up to 4K. There are three different factory overclock profiles to choose from with this graphics card, all of which are available when you install the Gaming APP software. All of the options are fairly tame in comparison to other GTX 1080 Ti cards we’ve tested in the past, but it is good to have the flexibility to choose different options, including a Silent Mode if noise is a particular bugbear.

One of the most pleasing attributes about the GAMING X TRIO is its ability to overclock beyond the factory settings. We managed to nudge the frequencies up with a manual overclock and benefits of such a modification meant a gain of 10-15fps in-game.

While there are many great aspects about GAMING X TRIO, there are some obvious caveats – size and weight are two areas which are synonymous with flagship graphics cards but will need to be taken into account. We also thought it was quite strange to have LED functionality across the card, but only the outside edge and logo is able to have RGB adjustment. The LEDs around the fans are fixed to red, which could interfere with a themed build (they will simply need disabling in the software).

Coming in at a cost of £750 GBP and $800 USD, GAMING X TRIO is priced reasonably well. There are some cards which are cheaper in this category but they certainly don’t offer some of the benefits that GAMING X TRIO puts forward – principally the strong thermal solution. Not to mention, we also get a generous 3 years’ warranty with 12 month XSplit Premium license, which will come in handy for those streaming.

In what is likely to be the last custom card for the GTX 1080 Ti, MSI are going out with a bang. GAMING X TRIO ticks all the boxes and is definitely one to add to the short list.

Pros
+ Pleasing to the eye
+ Exceptional build quality
+ Excellent performance
+ Great thermal solution
+ Low-noise operation
+ Three factory overclock profiles to use
+ Additional overclocking headroom
+ Includes 12 month XSplit Premium license
+ 3-year warranty

Cons
– LEDs around fans are fixed to red
– Large
– Very weighty

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