Packaging

The Card

With the Expert line, MSI is introducing a new design theme for their lineup and I have to say it looks mighty good. Both the main cooler shroud and the backplate are made from high-quality metal with a nice matte surface texture. The card is designed so that hot air gets exhausted out of the case by the front fan and the back fan pulls air through the card.


Dimensions of the card are 31.0 x 14.0 cm, and it weighs 1886 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 61 mm.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4a ports and one HDMI 2.1a (same as Ampere and same as non-Super Ada).

NVIDIA introduced the concept of dual NVDEC and NVENC Codecs with the Ada Lovelace architecture. This means there are two independent sets of hardware-accelerators; so you can encode and decode two streams of video in parallel or one stream at double the FPS rate. The new 8th Gen NVENC now accelerates AV1 encoding, besides HEVC. You also get an "optical flow accelerator" unit that is able to calculate intermediate frames for videos, to smooth playback. The same hardware unit is used for frame generation in DLSS 3.


All GeForce RTX 4080 and 4080 Super graphics cards use the 12+4 pin ATX 12VHPWR connector, an adapter cable is included in the box.

Teardown

The MSI "backplate" has the fan seamlessly integrated.


Once the main cooler shroud has been removed, the actual heatsink becomes visible.


There's six heatpipes and the main cooler also provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The front cooler shroud is made from metal, which greatly enhances its look and feel.