Overall and Final Verdict
With all of our testing out of the way, we can step back and process everything that we saw in our testing. The RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC visually is in a lot of ways the opposite of what the RTX 5080 Founders Edition was that I took a look at yesterday. Nvidia has worked towards making that card design a little more compact, though it is still large. But the RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC is a giant card, like a lot of the higher-end aftermarket cards for the last few generations. Not only is it a 3 ½ slot wide card but it is longer and taller than the Founders Edition as well. Where the Founders Edition’s styling is simple MSI has a much more aggressive styling here. Unlike MSI’s Suprim line which is very similar to the Vanguard, they have a lot of layers, textures, and lighting. It is a lot like the MSI Gaming Trio but it has turned things up to 11. This is the highest-end “gaming” styling-focused card in the lineup. It’s going to depend a lot on what you like in a card, I know for me I would still prefer the Suprim, but a younger me would have preferred this.
Beyond the styling, even though this design does have plastic in the fan shroud where the MSI Suprim cards don’t. MSI did still utilize aluminum designs on the fan shroud and the card has a full coverage aluminum backplate on the back as well. The RGB lighting wasn’t overboard, most of the lighting is hidden away and used as underglows for some of the different overhands on the cards shroud. That looks a lot better than just random lighting all over the place. MSI did use a similar 12VHPWR adapter design to what we saw last year and I would have preferred it to be a little more like Nvidia’s new design. But MSI’s design did impress me with a really simple way to help users make sure they know they have it plugged in all of the way. The connection is bright yellow but won't be visible unless you don’t have it plugged in completely. It’s a simple but effective solution. That said, the power connection does still point directly up, and because the card is so tall a lot of cases are going to have that power connection up against the side panel. An angled plug would make a huge difference there to help avoid issues with the power connection like the 40 Series saw.
The large card design also means a large cooler and that cooler showed off in our testing. Our stock fan profile temperature testing had it in the middle of the pack. But that is because the card comes set to the silent BIOS. More testing showed just how capable the cooler can be when you start to turn the fans up. Even with the stock fan profile, however, it outperformed the Founders Edition and it did that by running nearly silent and with the three fans running at just 36% while running under load for a half hour. The overclock as well as the cooling translated to a surprisingly good improvement in in-game performance in my testing. Most overclocked cards get you a percent at most. What I ended up seeing was 2.9% at 1080p, 2.5% at 1440p, and 1.8% at 4k. The RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC, just like the Founders Edition still outperforms the RTX 4090 at 1080p and 1440p but falls behind at 4k because of its smaller VRAM and memory interface. DLSS 4 adds another dimension as well. DLSS in general is a great tool but with DLSS 4 Nvidia has significantly improved the visual quality while also adding in Frame Generation x3 and x4. You can see improvements up to 500% from no DLSS to DLSS 4 and while Nvidia has the RTX 5080 targeted at 1440p gaming, that makes high refresh rate 4k gaming just as possible, as long as the games you want to play support it. The overclock for the RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC did translate to more power usage and the performance improvements weren’t enough to make up for it dropping the RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC in our power efficiency charts.
As for pricing, I’m writing this ahead of the launch but from what I have seen the RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC is going to be launching at $1229.99. If that is the case, that is a big jump up over the $999 MSRP of the RTX 5080 Founders Edition. But typically it isn’t long before those MSRP cards are hard to come by. Once that is the case is this the card to go with? Well, the higher price certainly has dropped the card down in our score per $ charts. Right now a majority of the cards are a better value so this isn’t a value buy but the RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC is an impressive card assuming you can fit it into your PC.
Live Pricing: HERE
