Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsFirst impressions
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 2, 2021
I see many users leaving low star reviews because they paid more than msrp for a GPU. I am not deducting any stars for that. This card is msrp around $1100 on MSI's website. I paid $1790 from a third party seller. My 1080 ti died and I needed something and you either pay an inflated price or wait who knows how long for a notify queue.
This card is big. It measured 12" long. It is heavy and seems to be well built with a metal back plate. It came with a support bracket. I installed it but I don't know how much good it will do since I can flex it with my hand. My motherboard has the reinforced pcie slots so that helps too. It has 3 8 pin connections for power.
After installing and firing up my pc I tried to download the dragon center software that is required to change the RGB lighting on the card. I went to the support section of the MSI website as directed by the included paperwork in the box. I downloaded the dragon center and it went through the installation process. Once complete nothing happened. I googled it and it is a common issue. I ended up having to install a Microsoft app called MSI Center. It installed properly and the good thing about it is that you can install just the software that you want. I only installed the mystic light software to be able to change the color of the RGB lights. I went through all the different options and ended up choosing the static lighting. It is way too bright. I have it on the lowest setting and it is still brighter than the lights on my motherboard, case fans and memory. Also turning it down to the lowest setting makes the MSI logo barely visible. I had read that people weren't impressed with the low quality RGB on this card. I agree. If you choose an option like having the lights scroll back and forth they look like they are stuttering instead of a smooth flow like on my Corsair Vengeance led ram. It is a bit ridiculous that I had to jump through so many hoops just to change the color of the lights.
I was warned on a forum that my Seasonic Prime Titanium 850 PSU might have issues with this card and cause frequent crashes. There are a lot of people complaining of this. So far I have not had any crashing issues. I ran the Heaven benchmark stress test a couple of times without any issues. I also read that the 3000 series cards run too hot. The thermal limit on this one is 93 C. I got up to 87 C with Heaven. I played a game afterward and the card was still running pretty hot. I am not sure if the heat created during the Heaven benchmark was having a hard time dissipating because I played the same game again the next day and my temps never exceeded 48 to51C. Right now it is 23C at idle.
The fans are very quiet. I can run them at 70% and barely hear them. I set a custom fan curve in MSI Afterburner and one thing that is interesting is that you have to run the fans at a minimum of 30% with Afterburner. I never let my cards run in silent mode (fans off) so not a big deal to me.
I can't offer much feedback on the performance of the card since I am still running an old I7 7700K CPU. It is definitely not enough CPU for a 3080. It looks like it is difficult to buy any pc components right now, not just GPU's. I am waiting until prices and stock get back to normal before buying a new CPU and motherboard. I opened quite a few games I have played recently to see what the frames per second were. Not much different than my 1080ti. I'm sure with an I9 10900 or better I would see a huge difference.
This seems to be a decent GPU. I was hoping to get my hands on an EVGA FTW3 but people in the notify queue are saying they have been waiting for a year or more. The third party prices on that model are over 2K. MSI and ASUS were my second choice so when I saw this at $1790 I figured this was probably the most reasonable deal right now. What a scam that these cards were supposed to be priced really low and you can't even find them in stock for how long now?
Update 10/4/21
I may have been wrong about the $1100 retail price on MSI's website. I can't even find pricing now. I must have seen it somewhere else.
After initially setting my RGB colors with Mystic Light I cannot get it to work again. I don't plan on changing the color again so I am just leaving it alone. If you want to continually change your RGB setup you may have issues with this.
MSI Afterburner has recorded a core clock speed of 2010MHz. The card is factory overclocked at 1830 so this is a nice bump since I haven't done any overclocking with it at all. Apparently Nvidia GPU boost will overclock these cards automatically as long as there is thermal headroom. My card is running at 23C at idle right now. The hottest it has got while gaming is 54C. Way cooler than my 1080 ti.
