# MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio



## W1zzard (Sep 17, 2020)

The GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio is MSI's flagship RTX 3080. It comes with a large overclock out of the box, and the cooler is massive. This is the fastest RTX 3080 we've tested so far, and it's the quietest as well. Wow, and that with a classic triple-fan design that doesn't use any fancy airflow magic.

*Show full review*


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## Searing (Sep 17, 2020)

Nice, this was the one I was most interested in. Thanks for the detailed info, too bad about the graphene "lie" there. I did want to find out if the "graphene" backplate made a difference. Since Founder's are already gone apparently, I'll try to pick this one up. Currently has a $150 premium here.

Can you mention coil whine for all the cards? Was this one a problem? Some Founder's reviews posted "large coil whine" as a negative.

Newegg just says "*Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" *for the last 15 minutes. I assume someone is somehow getting all the orders?


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## gridracedriver (Sep 17, 2020)

Power draw is embarazing


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## SDR82 (Sep 17, 2020)

How does the quality of the various components on the PCB compare to that of the 2080 Super Gaming X Trio?


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## ExplodingCaps (Sep 17, 2020)

Disappointing result from msi, they stripped down the 3 phases for gpu core, consuming just more 13 watts and running 3 dba lower from the tuf model and yet 13 degrees hotter. The rtx 20 gaming x trio cooling configuration is better than this. I don't know why they bother using direct heatpipe cooling again, direct heatpipe is prone with unleveled surface, and now the memory module is sharing heatsink with the gpu core. Well, this model is the first in my no go list this generation. I hope the lightning will be far better than this.


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## bug (Sep 17, 2020)

Whoaaa, 5 in row now. When is the last time you slept @W1zzard ?
Edit: Make that seven in a row, I forgot about the PCIe scaling and Intel vs AMD. Great stuff, fingers crossed it brings in the page clicks.


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## W1zzard (Sep 17, 2020)

bug said:


> When is the last time you slept


Tonight  but up since 5 AM, and it's not over.. more reviews soon, and 3090 next week



bug said:


> fingers cross it brings in the page clicks


Not doing it for the clicks, even though, looking at some traffic numbers I think I should put out more "AMD" content


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## Icon Charlie (Sep 17, 2020)

gridracedriver said:


> Power draw is embarazing


As stated by Adored TV AND myself... you are getting your performance increase  at the expense of wattage increase.  It does not matter which board partner you will be dealing with.* It is the decisions of Nvidia to go this route to save as much  money as possible.  This is why you have such a high wattage usage. *


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## robertmi (Sep 17, 2020)

The temperature graph is from Founders Edition graphics card


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## W1zzard (Sep 17, 2020)

robertmi said:


> The temperature graph is from Founders Edition graphics card


Fixed, not even sure how that happened


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## Searing (Sep 17, 2020)

Icon Charlie said:


> As stated by Adored TV AND myself... you are getting your performance increase  at the expense of wattage increase.  It does not matter which board partner you will be dealing with.* It is the decisions of Nvidia to go this route to save as much  money as possible.  This is why you have such a high wattage usage. *



nVidia should have gone with 7nm last time, and 7nm EUV this time, but perhaps the price difference is larger than we imagine, you can't just look at silicon costs. If you do that, an Intel 4 core is only worth $10 haha. If the 3080 was $100 more to save 50 watts you might not be happier.


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## bug (Sep 17, 2020)

W1zzard said:


> Tonight  but up since 5 AM, and it's not over.. more reviews soon, and 3090 next week


And then 3070. And then RDNA2. Best part of the year, I reckon.


W1zzard said:


> Not doing it for the clicks, even though, looking at some traffic numbers I think I should put out more "AMD" content


Oh, you can put out Nvidia content too, to get clicks. Just don't say positive things about them


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## madshi (Sep 17, 2020)

The measurement image suggests it should be 33 x 14 cm, but the text (incorrectly) reads that it's 32 x 13 cm. It's a world of a difference because all the HTPC cases can handle 13 cm cards, but not 14 cm cards.


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## pigulici (Sep 17, 2020)

So, what psu we need for this?


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## W1zzard (Sep 17, 2020)

madshi said:


> The measurement image suggests it should be 33 x 14 cm, but the text (incorrectly) reads that it's 32 x 13 cm. It's a world of a difference because all the HTPC cases can handle 13 cm cards, but not 14 cm cards.


Fixed



pigulici said:


> So, what psu we need for this?


Literally mentioned in the article, I'd say 700 W should be a good start


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## jonup (Sep 17, 2020)

pigulici said:


> So, what psu we need for this?


It seems like these cards like to pull upto 400W. My current 10core I9 system would pull ~350W under stress test (no GPU yet). So 750W quality PSU at a minimum but probably 850w recommended. Depending on your configuration things will change. A Ryzen R7 will probably do with 100-150W less.


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## Nater (Sep 17, 2020)

pigulici said:


> So, what psu we need for this?


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## pigulici (Sep 17, 2020)

Thanks, didn't had the time to read all, I am at work now...


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## kapone32 (Sep 17, 2020)

W1zzard said:


> Fixed, not even sure how that happened


Lack of sleep   keep up the good work though.

These cards are quite nice but if the 3080 consumes almost 380 watts when Gaming? How much will the 3090 draw and will it have double the performance to justify the more than double MSRP?


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## asdkj1740 (Sep 17, 2020)

some said the msi gaming x 3080 needs 2000rpm to shine its true hidden cooling performance 



			https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV19f4y1S7ze
		

17:00 
the guy said the fans spin up later and bring back the gpu temp from 70c to 62c.






						NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 评测 - 第8页 - 显卡 -  Chiphell - 分享与交流用户体验
					

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 评测,第8页,2020年9月2日 , 时隔约两年后NVIDIA终于再度换代,发布了全新的GeForce RTX 30系列显卡.此次RTX 30的首发阵容亦从定位最上层的三款型号开始,包括RTX 3090,RTX 3080和RTX 3070.率先开卖的,是于9月17日正式发售的高端代  ...,显卡,评测 ,Chiphell - 分享与交流用户体验




					www.chiphell.com
				



this review shows much closer temp performance between msi gaming x and asus tuf.
and 2000rpm for gaming x is quiet loud, seems to be explained why msi has chosen 1500rpm for normal loading.


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## Vayra86 (Sep 17, 2020)

kapone32 said:


> Lack of sleep   keep up the good work though.
> 
> These cards are quite nice but if the 3080 consumes almost 380 watts when Gaming? How much will the 3090 draw and will it have double the performance to justify the more than double MSRP?



How would a 3090 with 1,2 GPC more than the 3080 ever get double performance? What fairy tales are this? And when did a double perf card ever cost double on the top end?

3090 will likely draw around 400-420, I reckon on the AIB cards. The TDP gap is only 30W. Still a lot, I do agree on that.

Looking at these cards it seems like this node was pushed to, and maybe a little bit over the limit here. Not a pretty sight IMO. Pascal and Turing already gained some substantial watts on OC, but this... Man.


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## Searing (Sep 17, 2020)

jonup said:


> It seems like these cards like to pull upto 400W. My current 10core I9 system would pull ~350W under stress test (no GPU yet). So 750W quality PSU at a minimum but probably 850w recommended. Depending on your configuration things will change. A Ryzen R7 will probably do with 100-150W less.



You can probably use a high quality 550W Gold / Plat PSU with the proper mindfulness and settings in the BIOS if you had to (don't buy a 10900k or just lock it to 75W, it won't affect gaming performance). 600W+ is preferred.


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## Footman (Sep 17, 2020)

The performance of these cards is amazing. Complete overkill for my type of gaming. 5700xt is my sweet spot for 2k gaming with freesync 144hz monitor. I may look at big navi when it comes out though. 

Question: the 3080 is obviously positioned at a 4k gaming card. Is 10gb of memory enough for 4k gaming at ultra settings?


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## Jazz107 (Sep 17, 2020)

How are you pulling 425W sustained in Furmark from a card with a 350W limit set in vBIOS without any kind of mod?
I get peaks over the PL but 425W sustained?


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## Darktalon (Sep 17, 2020)

What's the likelihood of flashing a custom bios to let us unleash higher wattage into the card? I don't want a 3x 8-pin with such a pitiful power limit. I don't care how how or how inefficient the power usage is, i want to push it to the limit!


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## harrywhy (Sep 18, 2020)

It seems MSI Trio has better chip and higher boosted clock than ASUS Tuf, but the cooling and power supply is even worse than ASUS Tuf. So which one should I go for? A better overclock performance card? Or a better power supply and cooling card?


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## Minus Infinity (Sep 18, 2020)

So sad to see actual RT performance has not improved much, it's just the sheer grunt of the card carrying over to better performance with RT enabled, but the RT cores aren't doing much better. They have to rely on DLSS to get good performance with RT and that limits it to a handful of games. One can only hope Hopper does a hell of a lot better on RT and doesn't focus too much on rasterization. 120fps at 4K ultra is a good target but 100% increase in RT performance is needed at least.


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## B-Real (Sep 18, 2020)

I didn't see this coming: TUF is just killing the MSI Gaming X for $30 less. This MSI model is a massive disappointment. :/



harrywhy said:


> It seems MSI Trio has better chip and higher boosted clock than ASUS Tuf, but the cooling and power supply is even worse than ASUS Tuf. So which one should I go for? A better overclock performance card? Or a better power supply and cooling card?


Well, the MSI got 1% better than the TUF, which is nothing. In return, TUF is 13 degreed cooler while being only 3 dBA louder. And there is the quiet BIOS mode which is a bit quiter than MSI. I don't know if it means performance loss. Anyway, I would definitely go with the TUF as it is $30 less.


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## REEEEETARD HOOOOO (Sep 18, 2020)

Okay, can someone explain this to me?



> Power consumption of the Gaming X might look scary at first: triple 8-pin power inputs, up to 425 W in Furmark, and 315 W in typical gaming. Actually, if we take the performance gain over FE into account, there's no loss in power efficiency—4% faster, 4% more power. Good. Custom designs usually compromise on some efficiency to achieve higher performance. While three 8-pins are a little bit more complicated to use than dual 8-pins, it's a reasonable choice, as it gave MSI enough power headroom to achieve meaningful performance gains. That's why I find it surprising that MSI has set the manual power limit adjustment range for overclocking to just 350 W, which is lower than the 370 W on the Founders Edition. Also, considering 3x 8-pin + slot power = 525 W power capability, a 350 W limit seems like a waste of that third power connector.



So can you no longer adjust the TDP limit? on my 980TI I can set 130% TDP. I was hoping a 3x8pin would allow for you to just maintain max clock with the added juice. I get overclocking is fairly dead now but I was really hoping with these being so badly power limited that with 3x8 pin you could maintain at least max clock with the 3 pin.

Is that SOL now? Is that something that a BIOS flash could fix or may get patched down the road?

This was looking to be a huge feature to me and I am confused.


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## R0H1T (Sep 18, 2020)

Well there's always *hard-mods *for those who want the last 0.001% of performance at the expense of 10% (or more) power.


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## jonup (Sep 18, 2020)

Nater said:


> View attachment 168991



How are R7 and I7 pulling the same wattage? These are cookie cutter charts, Intel consumes much more power at full multi-threaded tilt. Zen2 can easily get away with with 100W less watts.



kapone32 said:


> Lack of sleep   keep up the good work though.
> 
> These cards are quite nice but if the 3080 consumes almost 380 watts when Gaming? How much will the 3090 draw and will it have double the performance to justify the more than double MSRP?



These are peak draws. Sustained draws are in the low 300s. every quality psu will handle slight peaks like these. 3090 will draw about 50W more on average than 3080, supposedly. And no it will not have double the performance because that's not how things work in life. You pay premium for premium goods.



Searing said:


> You can probably use a high quality 550W Gold / Plat PSU with the proper mindfulness and settings in the BIOS if you had to (don't buy a 10900k or just lock it to 75W, it won't affect gaming performance). 600W+ is preferred.


My results are with no power limits. I'm giving the worst case scenario. Just in case you want to render on the side while gaming.... or do a PSU test.



REEEEETARD HOOOOO said:


> Okay, can someone explain this to me?
> 
> 
> 
> ...











						ASUS GeForce RTX 3080 TUF Gaming OC Review
					

The ASUS GeForce RTX 3080 TUF Gaming OC comes with a small factory overclock and a huge cooler that achieves amazing temperatures that are much better than the NVIDIA Founders Edition. The TUF also features a dual BIOS with a "quiet" mode that makes this 4K monster card almost silent.




					www.techpowerup.com
				



Power limits section should answer your question. Asus board does 109%TDP


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## REEEEETARD HOOOOO (Sep 18, 2020)

jonup said:


> How are R7 and I7 pulling the same wattage? These are cookie cutter charts, Intel consumes much more power at full multi-threaded tilt. Zen2 can easily get away with with 100W less watts.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


my question was why is it so low? is it moddable or will it get a patch and be able to increase it? or did nvidia force AIB to cap it? It is pointlessly low for a 3x8 pin. It is obvious this was rushed to market. Most brands don't even have boards out yet. EVGA supposedly is going to have 420w limit.


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## Bubster (Sep 18, 2020)

this supply shortage on purpose is very disappointing ...i hope AMD will not do the same


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## jonup (Sep 18, 2020)

REEEEETARD HOOOOO said:


> my question was why is it so low? is it moddable or will it get a patch and be able to increase it? or did nvidia force AIB to cap it? It is pointlessly low for a 3x8 pin. It is obvious this was rushed to market. Most brands don't even have boards out yet. EVGA supposedly is going to have 420w limit.


I really don't know. My guess is 350W is a lot of heat to dissipate. Also many of these cards are peaking around 400W so they need all the power connectors already.


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## medi01 (Sep 18, 2020)

Footman said:


> Question: the 3080 is obviously positioned at a 4k gaming card. Is 10gb of memory enough for 4k gaming at ultra settings?


We are moving to 4k gaming, the way we moved to 1080p.
All cards somewhat faster than 2080s (next gen consoles) is a 4k card.


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## Aretak (Sep 18, 2020)

The cooler on this seems rather cheap and nasty compared to the Turing Gaming X Trio models. Very unimpressive results relative to the TUF.


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## vekspec (Sep 19, 2020)

Appreciate the review. I have this one on "pre-order", another way to say backorder but we have your order lol. Gives me some insight into what I'll eventually be receiving. My last Gaming X was the 1080 and it was good. Though 76deg load doesn't seem to much improved from FE. Finally 1440p 144hz gaming is a reality without turning down settings


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## TheUn4seen (Sep 19, 2020)

Nice review, personally I'm waiting for the MSI Ventus review. Where I live it's significantly cheaper, and if it's reasonably quiet it's probably a much better buy. I'll also wait for all this over hyped rush stupidity to end. I mean, who is thick enough to wait at 3 in the morning, hitting F5 like a mad man, trying to buy a consumer product and raging like a hyperactive child if he can't get what he wants? Have some dignity, don't be like "fruit company" fanboys.

Hype and availability aside, this seems to be a good GPU, even if obviously stretched to the max from factory. Tiny overclocking headroom makes it an exercise in futility, power draw is what I find personally annoying - I really wanted to use the Corsair SF600 Platinum, but now I think it might be too close for comfort, even if I use 9700k running at 4.8GHz.


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## Shatun_Bear (Sep 20, 2020)

This power draw is so horrendous it's approaching the same number of watts as my little office eco *heater*, which is 500W 

I advise people to wait for 3080 20GB but an extra 10GB will add another 30-50W . Maybe the 16GB 3070S/Ti will be the first good Ampere card.


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## basco (Sep 20, 2020)

i am baffled by the power limit too!
evga ftw has 400 max but does not have really better oc said Gnexus


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## bug (Sep 20, 2020)

It will be interesting to see how the power draw is handled in the future.
In the past, a smaller node used to solve this, but we don't have many smaller nodes left and definitely none on the horizon. 5nm is ramping up, but it will be gobbled up by mobile SoCs and stuff for at least a couple of years from now.


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## ppn (Sep 21, 2020)

> Volume production planned* before the end of 2020, TSMC's N6 *technology provides customers with additional cost-effective benefits while extending the industry-leading power and performance from the 7nm family for a broad array of applications, ranging from high-to-mid end mobile, consumer applications, AI, networking, 5G infrastructure, *GPU*, and high-performance computing.



Give it another 10-12 months.


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## kapone32 (Sep 21, 2020)

Vayra86 said:


> How would a 3090 with 1,2 GPC more than the 3080 ever get double performance? What fairy tales are this? And when did a double perf card ever cost double on the top end?
> 
> 3090 will likely draw around 400-420, I reckon on the AIB cards. The TDP gap is only 30W. Still a lot, I do agree on that.
> 
> Looking at these cards it seems like this node was pushed to, and maybe a little bit over the limit here. Not a pretty sight IMO. Pascal and Turing already gained some substantial watts on OC, but this... Man.


 I know what you mean but the way Jensen introduced and marketed them in Nvidia's launch video makes it seem like this card will be the cat's meow. It is funny though that I remember Jensen making fun of Vega needing 2x8 pin. I fully agree with the 400 to 420 but I can see a recommended 1000W PSU for this just to ensure it remains in the right price bracket.


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## Vayra86 (Sep 21, 2020)

kapone32 said:


> I know what you mean but the way Jensen introduced and marketed them in Nvidia's launch video makes it seem like this card will be the cat's meow. It is funny though that I remember Jensen making fun of Vega needing 2x8 pin. I fully agree with the 400 to 420 but I can see a recommended 1000W PSU for this just to ensure it remains in the right price bracket.



Yeah its funny how the same crap about power draw applies to different companies at each point in time 
If we have to believe Nvidia everything is the cat's meow though... Huang has that same tone of voice with every product he presents, going all 'Jobs' on it.


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## bug (Sep 21, 2020)

Vayra86 said:


> Yeah its funny how the same crap about power draw applies to different companies at each point in time
> If we have to believe Nvidia everything is the cat's meow though... Huang has that same tone of voice with every product he presents, going all 'Jobs' on it.


I think it applies the same: 350W+ is a crapload for a video card. Vega also had the privilege of offering a pretty poor perf/W on top of that.

3090 will be something else though :shudder:


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