MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ti

The rumored and long-awaited Geforce RTX 3080 Ti has finally arrived. With an MSRP of well over nearly $1200, it fills the huge price gap between the current flagship RTX 3090 ($1499+) and the RTX 3080 ($699+), though it clearly leans a lot closer to the 3090. From a hardware and cost perspective, it makes sense. But as a consumer, it’s a bit of a kick in the pants. Considering that it’s still impossible to get one anywhere close to that price currently, we’ll have to use some creative thinking or dream of a time when the market settles. The MSI RTX 3080 Ti Suprim has an MSRP of… well, it’s going to be north of $1199.99, but that’s all we know. We don’t have information on other card partner pricing, but you can expect the Asus Strix and Gigabyte Aorus and EVGA FTW models to be in the same ballpark and rare as unicorns. Performance versus a comparably overclocked RTX 3080 improved by a few percent on average and filled in the smaller performance gap between the flagship and former second in line card. The 3080 Ti comes with 12 GB of GDDR6X RAM, two more GB’s worth. While this doesn’t do much for users today, games could cross that 10 GB threshold as time goes on, leading to a slightly longer lifespan for this card. Is it worth the price difference? That depends on the user. If you’re running 4K, the leash would be slightly shorter, so the extra 2 GB could be more beneficial sooner. In the end, Nvidia’s RTX 3080 Ti is a cut-down flagship part that performs almost as fast as the mighty RTX 3090 and a (slightly) lower price tag with it. I would like to have seen the RTX 3080 Ti start closer to $999. Staring there would bring aftermarket cards like this down a couple of hundred dollars too, but that’s all a dream. MSI’s Suprim will surely cost more than the Founders card, but who knows where it lands compared to the other like partner cards. Between the robust power delivery, quiet Tri Frozr 2S cooling solution, premium styling that fits in with most build themes, and performance that’s just about as fast as an RTX 3090, the MSI 3080 Ti Suprim is is ready to take on any contender in its space.

There isn't enough sugar in the Tate and Lyle factory that will help this particular spoonful of medicine go down. Let's get the good out of the way to begin with, whilst we lace up our bovver boots. Of the three RTX 3080 Tis we've got for review today the SuprimX is unquestionably the prettiest. If you want a card which shows itself off as a beacon in the middle of your case window, it's the very card for you. Additionally it's got lots of performance, even more than the Nvidia FE version, and runs nice and quiet/cool even under hefty loading. It is built like a tank and looks the absolute business. Right. When the RTX 3080 was launched the Nvidia version was £649 and the MSI SuprimX a hefty £850. From that we can glean that the cooler is worth, if MSI brought cards at the retail price and sold at cost (which they definitely don't), £200 tops. Why then does the Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti FE cost £1049, and the MSI SuprimX cost £1749?

There's no doubt about it; we like the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti in general, and the MSI SUPRIM X even better. Really, MSI has a fabulous card here at hand with the SUPRIM X. Despite the prophetic naming; it's a product that oozes quality at that hardware level; the hardware really is that good. The looks are great; that aluminum backplate, newly designed cooler, and dual BIOS, is it worth a price premium? We doubt that a little, to be honest, especially over the reference FE design (which is really good). But this is over-engineering at its best. Remember that all cards are more or less in that same performance bracket, resulting in a meager 4~5% additional performance seen over the FE edition, for this, all amped and beefed up product. Make no mistake, it's love and fantastic, but is it worth the highest price premium? We doubt that. In general, I think anyone would agree with me; we all would love to own a 3080 Ti. This is a very well-balanced enthusiast-class graphics card. Basically, it's almost a 3090 with half the memory and a few configuration tweaks. I am totally fine with the 12GB memory btw; the 24 GB on the 3090 is impressive but far-fetched and made the product extra expensive. 12GB is a notably well-balanced value in the year 2021. Performance-wise NVIDIA carved out something beautiful. You will be way up there in the highest performance regions, and even at Ultra HD, you can enable Raytracing with the combination of DLSS where applicable. Competition-wise, overall, AMD will still win in the lower resolutions thanks to their massive L3 buffer. However, in more demanding scenarios, NVIDIA takes the lead in rasterized shading performance when the resolution goes up when it comes to brute force muscle power in more demanding scenarios. NVIDIA also has faster Raytracing performance and, of course, the implementation of DLSS that will support that raytracing even further in performance. For raytracing, it's still hard to find Games with raytraced properly reflections, but that's what you should be after, and the numbers will grow in the future. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti performs well on all fronts, performance, cooling, and acoustics as an overall package of hard- and software. MSI did a spectacular job here, but in the end, that choice rests at the end-user level availability and ... pricing. If pricing remains under control at etailers, this card will be a hit—what a card. If you can find it at the right price, highly recommended.

The MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ti SUPRIM X is a mouthful to say but it is also a beast of a card. The SUPRIM X range always has a lot to offer and the 3080 Ti SUPRIM X is no different. It comes with a triple-fan cooling solution to make sure the card stays as cool as possible! Throw in some RGB near the fans, on the side and a nice RGB dragon logo on the backplate and you also have one aesthetically pleasing GPU on your hands! MSI has been doing this for a long time now and knows what their fans want and with their SUPRIM X range, they are looking to be one of, if not the best GPU range currently available!

NVIDIA has announced a $1200 price point for RTX 3080 Ti, which matches the RTX 2080 Ti MSRP. In reality, I doubt we'll see cards retail for anything close to that. To put things into perspective: The RTX 3090 goes for $2900 right now, RTX 3080 for $1500, RX 6800 XT for $1700, and RX 6900 XT for $2100. NVIDIA confirmed to us that the RTX 3080 Ti comes with the LHR (low-hash-rate) mining performance limiter, which hopefully won't be circumvented this time, so that at least gamers can get those cards. It won't make much of a difference for pricing, though. The general market demand is simply too high and supply is too low. MSI hasn't provided any pricing to us yet. I'm fairly certain there will be a serious price increase over the NVIDIA baseline price. It is justified to some extent, no doubt. You're getting a large factory OC, a much better cooler, dual BIOS, etc. I still feel like I wouldn't spend more than $100 extra for these features, which is why I'm estimating $2100 as a realistic market price. You really have to look at current pricing, though. If you can find RTX 3080 Ti at similar price levels as the RX 6900 XT, definitely go for the 3080 Ti. It has higher overall performance,and better RT performance, albeit with higher power draw. The RTX 3080 could be an interesting option if the price gap is bigger than the 10% performance gap between the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3080. Last but not least, possibly the strongest competition for GeForce and for the PC gaming market overall comes from game consoles, which can be found for well under $1000 and will play all the new games, too; perhaps with slightly worse graphics, but the money saved can buy you a 4K TV and a lot of games.

We've got two high end RTX 3080 12GB models for review today, and both of them are so similar that we could almost say the same thing about both. Perhaps the thing we think the most about the revised RTX 3080 isn't anything to do with either ASUS or MSI, but instead is to do with Nvidia themselves and where this card fits in the market. Forgive us, then, for using largely the same text in both our conclusions. We'll deal with the individual card near the end.

Who makes the best custom-cooled graphics card? That's been debatable for quite some time, with AIB partners struggling to compete with Nvidia's Founders Edition in terms of both price and presentation, but MSI has stepped up to the plate and the firm's Suprim X is our current pick of the bunch. Having sampled the cooler in RTX 3070 Ti form, we deemed MSI's implementation "an excellent choice for those gamers who prefer to keep noise levels down to a minimum," and came away suitably impressed with performance and build quality. When the opportunity came to put the superior RTX 3080 Ti Suprim X through its paces, we naturally jumped at the chance.