Introduction

The MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Suprim X is the company's new flagship gaming graphics card and part of NVIDIA's refresh of the RTX 30-series "Ampere" family to bolster its position in the high-end segment. The Suprim X is an MSI exercise at leveling up to the NVIDIA Founders Edition in terms of original design and build quality. The most premium design and materials combine with the company's most advanced graphics-card cooling solution and overclocking-optimized PCB to offer the highest tier of factory overclocks.



NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti at its Computex 2021 event to answer two very specific challenges to its product stack—the Radeon RX 6900 XT outclassing the RTX 3080 and the RX 6800 performing well against the RTX 3070. The RTX 3080 Ti is designed to fill a performance gap between the RTX 3080 and the halo-segment RTX 3090.

The RTX 3080 Ti is based on the same 8 nm GA102 silicon as the RTX 3080, but features a lot more CUDA cores. More importantly, it maxes out the 384-bit wide GDDR6X memory bus of the GA102. NVIDIA is giving the card 12 GB of memory, not 24 GB like on the RTX 3090, which it considers a halo product that even targets certain professional use cases. The RTX 3080 Ti is also endowed with 320 TMUs, 320 Tensor cores, 80 RT cores, and 112 ROPs. The memory operates at the same 19 Gbps data-rate as the RTX 3080, which results in a memory bandwidth of 912 GB/s due to its increased bus width.

The MSI RTX 3080 Ti Suprim X supercharges the RTX 3080 Ti with its highest clock speeds—1830 MHz vs. 1665 MHz reference. It features the most elaborate version of the company's TriFrozr 2S cooling solution, with a metal alloy shroud, dense aluminium fin-stack heatsink, three TorX fans, similar power-delivery to the company's RTX 3090 Suprim X, and a metal back-plate. In this review, we take the card for a spin across our test-suite to tell you if shelling RTX 3090 kind of money for a top custom RTX 3080 Ti is worth it. MSI hasn't provided any pricing information yet, but we expect the card to go for around $2100, $100 more than our estimate for the NVIDIA baseline price.