MSI RTX 2080 Gaming X Trio Graphics Card Review

Overclocking, Noise, Heat and Power

The latest card from MSI does come with a massive cooler and some increased boost clocks already. However, manufacturers always play it a little safe and like to balance the temperature and acoustic performance too. Throw that out the window and crank the fans a little, however, and there’s usually a bit of horsepower left to safely squeeze out of the card.

I managed to get a respectable 185 MHz increase on the core clock, just 3 MHz above that of the Palit RTX 2080. Interestingly, the memory also overclocked the same, adding +750 MHz. Of course, that’s a big boost and a free one at that. Our original 3DMark score of 23581 saw a pleasant boost to 23600. Not massive, but faster is faster. Meanwhile, the Graphics Card went from 27962 to 28411.

3DMark Firestrike

Acoustic Performance

The MSI Trio X RTX 2080 features a zero RPM fan mode, so at idle, the card is completely silent; a trick the Palit didn’t possess. However, with all three fans on the go, the card was practically silent at just 41 dBa, making it quieter than an MSI 1070 Ti! Once overclocked, the fans still were happy to idle at low load, and only increased by 1dBa at full load.

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Overclocked

Thermal Performance

You would think with this cooler slacking off half the time and being so quiet, that it wasn’t cooling that well. Of course, you would be wrong, and the card is the coolest high-end card we’ve tested. 63c at load is shockingly low and speaks volumes to the quality of that new cooler design. It got up to 65c once overclocked though, but still way below the 71c we saw from the Palit RTX 2080, or the 84c of the GTX 1080 Ti.

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Overclocked

Power Consumption

As I said in the Palit review “there have been reports of these cards idling higher than Pascal chipsets and it appears to be a driver issue. We will revisit the RTX card testing in the coming weeks as drivers mature; these things happen pre-launch, it’s to be expected. To be honest, if this is the only hiccup so far, then Nvidia has gotten off pretty easy.” That still seems to be somewhat true, with higher than expected idle power. We present the results regardless and look forward to testing them again soon.

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Overclocked