Today, we are reviewing our second custom-design GTX 1080 Ti, this time from MSI. The MSI GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X comes with a moderately high overclock out of the box and the company's signature TwinFrozr thermal solution. Out of the box, the card is 7% faster than the reference "Founders Edition" card when averaged over our test suite at 4K resolution. This makes the card quicker than the much more expensive Titan X and a whopping 30% faster than the GTX 1080, which just a few weeks ago was the card every enthusiast wanted. AMD's fastest, the Fury X, is only able to deliver half the performance. This makes the GTX 1080 Ti a great option for 4K gaming as it is able to deliver 60 FPS at the highest settings in most of our titles. MSI did not overclock the memory chips, which could have yielded a little bit of easy extra performance as these new 11 Gbps GDDR5X chips work really well and reach close to 1500 MHz - a few MHz above 1376 MHz should have been no problem.

MSI's thermal solution is similar to that of the company's previous cards, but has seen some changes under the hood. The heatsink uses five heatpipes to keep the GPU and voltage regulation circuitry cool. Below that sits a baseplate that cools the memory chips. A backplate is installed, too, but lacks the RGB illumination we've seen on the company's Gaming Z, which is no big deal in my opinion as long as a backplate is included. Just like on the ASUS GTX 1080 Ti STRIX, the cooler's thickness has been increased to 2.5 slots, which seems to be becoming more common with GTX 1080 Ti designs. Graphics cards using more than two slots should be a non-issue these days since all motherboards have plenty of spacing; only users of small-form-factor cases should double check.

I'm happy to report that the MSI cooler doesn't even come close to throttling, which we did notice on the GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition. In our testing with heavy gaming, the card reaches only 72°C, which is a long way from the 83°C thermal cutoff beyond which the card will reduce clock speeds. MSI has also included the idle-fan-off feature we love so much since it provides a perfect noise-free experience during desktop work, Internet browsing, and even light gaming. Gaming noise of the GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X is a lot better than what we've seen on the Founders Edition, but lacks the "wow" from the company's earlier Gaming X cards. It is certainly quiet with 35 dBA, but I think it could still be quieter given temperatures are low. ASUS does a little bit better here, having both lower temperatures and slightly lower noise, but the differences are small.

Power consumption of Pascal is amazing, and the GTX 1080 Ti is no exception here. The overclocking and board design changes by MSI did reduce overall efficiency, though. It is roughly 15% worse than with the NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition. Some of that is expected due to the overclock out of the box, and around 280 W during gaming should be no problem anyway. The good thing is that this means upgrading the power input configuration from 6+8 to 8+8 was a justified move and is not just for show like we've seen on other cards.

The MSI GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X is currently available for preorder at a price point of $750, which is $50 more than the NVIDIA Founders Edition pricing. Considering that's a price increase of 7%, and the card gains 7% of extra performance out of the box thanks to its overclock, I'd say that's a reasonable price increase, and you get the better cooler on top. The price increase also looks more acceptable now that we've found out that the ASUS STRIX retails for $780. Compared to the ASUS STRIX, the MSI comes with higher clocks out of the box, but uses slightly more power too. Its cooler is also not doing as well as the one on the ASUS card: noise and temperatures are a bit higher. The ASUS STRIX offers a little bit more in features, like voltage measurement and tweaking points, the RGB backplate, and case fan headers, which the MSI GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X makes up for in price. In my opinion, both cards are pretty much identical; an awesome choice for 4K gaming with only minor differences that won't make or break the deal for the majority of users.