Let me start off by saying, that this card was not my first choice. I was initially holding out for an EVGA FTW 1080, but decided to pay a bit extra ($729) for the MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X, because I grew tired of waiting. After a few days of owning this card, I couldn't be happier.
Cooling and silence are the main focus of my build, and the Twin Frozr VI fans do a fantastic job at keeping the GPU frosty cool, and whisper-silent while gaming. Better yet, the fans turn off completely at temperatures below 60 degrees. The highest temperature I've seen from this card while testing Firestrike Ultra was 73 degrees - well below the throttling temperature. Also, the fan noise at at this point is like a slight rushing of air. In comparison, my previous build, which included dual GTX 780s in SLI would've sounded like a low-powered vacuum cleaner, while the temperatures would soar above 85 degrees.
Needless to say, this card obliterates any game at 1080p. Witcher 3 and GTA V run around 80 to 100 fps with everything maxed out. At 1440p, framerates stay well above 60 fps.
I haven't tested the limits of overclocking on this card, but it seems to overclock fairly well as far as Pascal is concerned. I have been able to achieve a stable 2,100 MHz on the Core Clock, but dialed it down to 1,900 MHz after a few hours of gaming. In my opinion, unless you're gaming at 4K on the highest possible settings, the extra overclock on this card is just overkill.
All in all, the MSI 1080 Gaming X is ready for any game that you can throw at it. Also, If you're interested in a silent PC, the Gaming X comes highly recommended, because of the fantastic implementation of the Twin Frozr VI cooler. It's also a big plus, that the Gaming X achieves its superior level of cooling with only two fans, whereas companies like Gigabyte, Asus, and Zotac all have three-fan GPUs which are obnoxiously long and inconvenient for some builds.
The only issue I have with this card (which caused me to dock one star in the rating), are LED lights on the shroud. The LED lights are extremely dim and the colors cannot be changed. There's a very small MSI logo at the side of the card, in which the colors can be changed through MSI's Gaming App. But, it's a tiny consolation for what should've been a better lit GPU - especially considering that MSI's competitors are decking out their respective 1080s in all sorts of colors.
| Max Screen Resolution | 7680 x 4320 |
|---|---|
| Memory Speed | 10108 MHz |
| Graphics Coprocessor | Nvidia GeForce |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 8 GB |
