MSI GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER 16G Expert, 16GB GDDR6X, HDMI, 3x DP

The GeForce RTX 4080 Super’s release is less exciting than the RTX 4070 Super. The RTX 4070 Super offered performance near an RTX 4070 Ti and, at the same time, kept the price of the RTX 4070. The RTX 4070 Ti Super was released at the same price as the RTX 4070 Ti. Although it offered increased VRAM and dual NVENC encoder, its performance is just around 5% faster than the outgoing RTX 4070 Ti. I guess the RTX 4080 Super is a bit better than the RTX 4070 Ti Super since its starting price is $200 less despite offering the same performance. I hope retailers will honor the starting price and that we will see many MSRP models on the release date.

The new MSI GeForce RTX 4080 Super Expert graphics card releasing today, introduces the company's latest attempt at an ultra-premium custom design tier. MSI is among the few NVIDIA board partners that's been making serious efforts to beat the NVIDIA Founders Edition in aesthetics and cooling performance. The new Expert brand sits alongside the company's SUPRIM X and SUPRIM Liquid tiers. It's also the first GeForce RTX product from the company to feature the MSI PRO logo that's usually found in notebooks, monitors, and pre-built desktops from the company targeted at workstation and creator PC market segments. So the MSI RTX 4080 Super Elite is meant for the high-end gaming PC crowd that does quite a bit of creator work on the side, paired with NVIDIA's Studio drivers. As for the GeForce RTX 4080 Super, it sits at the top of the Super series mid-lifecycle refresh of the RTX 40-series Ada. This refresh aims to being more performance at existing or lower price points. The RTX 4080 Super is recommended by NVIDIA for maxed out gaming at the 4K Ultra HD resolution, including with ray tracing. It is built on the same AD103 silicon as the original RTX 4080, but maxes it out, enabling all its available shaders. Perhaps the best aspect of the RTX 4080 Super isn't this increase in shaders, but a lowering in its MSRP to $1,000, from the $1,200 that the RTX 4080 launched at. This ensures that premium custom-design cards such as the MSI RTX 4080 Super Expert we're reviewing here, are priced similar to the original baseline price of the RTX 4080.