Overall and Final Verdict
Going into our coverage of the MSI RTX 4080 Gaming X Trio we already had a good idea of performance having already taken a look at the Nvidia RTX 4080 Founders Edition, but I was very interested in seeing the areas where the RTX 4080 Gaming X Trio would stand out. With its boost clock speed of 2595 MHz, the overclock of 90 Mhz wouldn’t be considered a big overclock at all. But I was surprised as I got into our testing that the RTX 4080 Gaming X Trio did consistently put itself ahead of the Founders Edition by a few percent, averaging 2% across all of our in-game tests as well. While not a huge margin, often small overclocks can fall into the margin of error so the consistency in the RTX 4080 Gaming X Trio’s performance was good to see. Like with the Founders Edition, which put the RTX 4080 Gaming X Trio up at the top of our charts in nearly every benchmark sitting behind the RTX 4090 big brother and well ahead of all of the 3000 series cards including the 3090 Ti which used to be a monster. DLSS 3 performance was impressive as well, which while the game list is just filling out right now offers impressive performance improvements, especially in CPU-limited games where normal GPU performance improvements would normally be minimal.
The RTX 4080 Gaming X Trio design stuck with the “gaming” styling which was a departure from the Founders Edition design. MSI’s design is good looking and I like that MSI integrated RGB accents without going overboard and not all of the lighting is dedicated to just backlighting branding. The card design however is very large, going even bigger than the Founders Edition which itself is big. Like with the Founders Edition the 12VHPWR connection is right up on top and facing directly up which on top of the card size is going to make fitting the card in a lot of cases very hard and as we learned with the 4090 it is also going to put a lot of strain on the connection as well. Speaking of, with the 12VHPWR connection it also means that most people will need to run the included adapter for now until more people have power supplies that support it.
The large card, even with three fans surprised me in two other ways. Its noise performance was extremely quiet, especially for it having a triple fan design. Because of the overclock, even with the larger card the RTX 4080 Gaming X Trio didn’t manage to outperform the Founders Edition in cooling, at least not with the stock fan profile. But there is still some headroom left in the cooling overall which is good.
For pricing, the RTX 4080 Gaming X Trio has an MSRP of $1310 which hits the pocketbook hard. None of the RTX 4080s are what I would consider a big value, which makes any of the pricing above the base $1199 price tag hard to swallow. But MSI does at least include the extra support bracket with the RTX 4080 Gaming X Trio and with the overclock and huge cooler you are getting something for the premium. Overall, like with the Founders Edition, the RTX 4080 Gaming X Trio is looking like a better option than the 4090 if you need high-level 4k gaming performance but aren’t looking to run a 4k high refresh rate monitor, but overall you are going to pay for it which isn’t a big surprise. Gaming at 4k has always been expensive.
Live Pricing: HERE
