A Closer Look

MSI's thermal solution uses six heatpipes, of which three are thicker and longer for improved cooling performance. This is the same cooler as on the MSI GTX 1080 Ti Lightning Z.


The backplate is made from metal to protect the card against damage during installation and handling. The Lightning Z had a heatpipe here, which is no longer included; it provided questionable gains anyway and makes little sense on a card like the Gaming X Trio where overclocking isn't the main focus.


Once the main heatsink is removed, a black metal baseplate becomes visible, which provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


MSI has upgraded the power input of their GTX 1080 Ti to two 8-pins. This input configuration is specified for up to 375 watts of power draw.


With Pascal, NVIDIA made some changes to how SLI works. In a nutshell, for 4K at 60 Hz and above, NVIDIA recommends new high-bandwidth SLI bridges it dubbed "SLI HB." These bridges occupy both SLI fingers. Traditional triple- and quad-SLI setups are gone as well. Only certain benchmarks can run more than the dual-SLI setup to which all games are limited.