Introduction

MSI GeForce RTX 4080 SUPRIM X represents the very best in custom-design graphics cards from MSI. The company created the SUPRIM line of graphics cards to lead its product-stack with the highest-quality materials, meeting its best industrial design. This is MSI's attempt at beating the NVIDIA Founders Edition in aesthetics. The RTX 4080 SUPRIM X is the company's fastest air-cooled RTX 4080 card, there will be a liquid-cooled RTX 4080 SUPRIM Liquid X in the lineup, too.

The GeForce RTX 4080 is designed to help NVIDIA consolidate in the high-end gaming graphics card segment, and has the same design goals as the RTX 4090—to give you a graphics card that can play any of the AAA game titles at 4K Ultra HD, with maxed out settings, and ray tracing added to the mix. The DLSS 3 frame-generation feature nearly doubles frame-rates, and should add a heap of future-proofing to this card.



The GeForce RTX 4080 is based on the new AD103 "Ada Lovelace" silicon, which is smaller than the massive AD102 on which the RTX 4090 is based, although larger than the AD104 on which performance-segment SKUs from the 70-series will be based, including the now-cancelled RTX 4080 12 GB, which was "unlaunched" due to branding problems.

The RTX 4080 is endowed with 9,728 CUDA cores across 76 streaming multiprocessors, 304 Tensor cores, 76 RT cores, and 112 ROPs. The card comes with 16 GB of memory, which is higher than the 10 GB or 12 GB that the RTX 3080 came with, but across a narrower 256-bit wide GDDR6X memory bus (done to reduce the number of memory chips to 8). The bandwidth shortfall is contained by using faster 22.4 Gbps memory chips, and deploying much larger on-die caches to speed up the memory sub-system.

The MSI RTX 4080 SUPRIM X features a rich-looking silvery, brushed-aluminium finish on both the cooler shroud and backplate, with a well-appointed RGB lighting setup that doesn't shout too loudly. It also uses premium components and thermal interface materials on the PCB and cooling solution. This card also features the company's highest grade of factory-overclocking for the RTX 4080, with the GPU running at 2.625 GHz, compared to 2.50 GHz reference. MSI is pricing the card at $1,380, which is surprisingly reasonable, considering the pricing of the six other custom-design cards we're reviewing today.