The GTX 1080 Ti Lightning is MSI's new flagship for the GTX 1080 Ti Series. It comes in three variants: Lightning, Lightning X, and Lightning Z, with the only difference being the GPU frequency, and pricing, of course. Today's review is of the Lightning Z, which is the highest-clocked version with a base clock of 1582 MHz and a Boost of 1695 MHz. These numbers might look lower than for other cards at first glance, but if you consider actual clocks, the Lightning Z does impress. On average, it runs 1960 MHz, with peaks going up to 1987 MHz. MSI has overclocked their memory chips too, which provides additional performance. Overall, this makes the GTX 1080 Ti Lightning Z the fastest GTX 1080 Ti we ever tested, with a 10% performance uplift over the Founders Edition at 4K resolution. Compared to the GTX 1080, the GTX 1080 Ti Lightning Z is 26% faster, and the difference to the GTX 1070 is 47%. AMD's fastest, the Fury X can only deliver about half the performance. With such performance numbers, the GTX 1080 Ti is a good solution for 4K gaming as it can offer decent framerates in nearly all games at maximum details.

MSI's GTX 1080 Ti Lightning is huge, having three slots, taking up 32 cm in length and 14 cm in height - make sure your case has room for it. As expected, a powerful thermal solution is included, which seems to be the best cooler I've seen in a long time. Temperatures are outstanding and better than any other GTX 1080 Ti, even with the overclock out of the box, which is higher than any other GTX 1080 Ti. At the same time, fan noise also matches the quietest GTX 1080 Tis (33 dBA), which clearly adds up to "best cooler." Personally, I would have dialed down the noise even a little bit further as there is plenty of temperature headroom to do so, but given the overclocker positioning of the product, I can understand MSI's choice of focusing a bit more on temperatures. MSI has also included serious cooling for the VRMs and was careful to ensure that the heavy cooler does not cause any sagging of the board. The Lightning does include the idle-fan-stop feature that's essential on any modern graphics card, which stops the fans at temperatures below 60°C for the perfect noise-free experience during desktop work, Internet browsing, and light gaming. An issue with the idle-fan-off system is that every time the temperature crosses the fan-stop threshold, all fans will spin at full speed momentarily, which according to MSI is for the dust cleaning function (other cards do this once during system startup). The card also comes with the best-looking RGB LED lighting design I've seen. Its LED elements are fronted by a diffuser, which gives you a soft glow and smooth color transitions. It looks mesmerizing in a G.Skill Trident Z kind of way.

Power consumption of the GTX 1080 Ti Lightning is higher than with the Founders Edition, but that is the case for every custom design and is due to changes in the VRM circuitry and higher clocks out of the box. Unlike other board vendors, power draw did not shoot through the roof on the Lightning Z. With 265 W average gaming power draw, it sips reasonable amounts of power, pretty much where I would have expected it to be. MSI has put three 8-pin power inputs on their card, which all are required to be connected for operation (I tested). This promises a power delivery capability of 525 W, something that's just not going to happen for the majority of users, especially not on Pascal, which sees nearly no gains from massive voltage increases. We measured Furmark maximum power at 322 W, which suggests a relatively conservative power limit setting given the capabilities of the card. Power limit adjustment in the software maxes out at 350 W, which has other cards offer more here, too.

Overclocking on our sample worked well, which may suggest the use of cherry-picked GPUs for the Lightning series, with the best ones going to the Lightning Z, I would assume. However, the maximum clocks of nearly all GTX 1080 Ti GPUs fall into a narrow band of 2000-2050 MHz max clock, no matter if you buy the cheapest or most expensive variant. Deciding on whether you should spend extra money to gain 20 or 30 MHz is up to you.

Newegg has the GTX 1080 Ti Lightning Z up for order now, at a price point off $869, which is seems a bit high considering you can find the cheapest GTX 1080 Ti at $700. On the other hand, you do get the best cooling solution and the best out-of-the-box experience without it requiring any tweaking. Personally, I think the Lightning Z is ideal for people who don't want to bother with overclocking and tweaking. If you have the money, just plop in the card and you can be sure it will run at nearly the maximum performance you can achieve - no need for the standard-level overclocking to get another 3% performance. Hardcore overclockers might also be interested in this card due to its power input circuitry, VRM cooling, voltage measurement capability, and dual BIOS with LN2 support. Us mere mortals might also want to look at the regular Lightning and Lightning X, which should come in at better (but yet unknown) price points.