Introduction

The MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Suprim X is the company's new flagship gaming graphics card and part of NVIDIA's refresh of the RTX 30-series "Ampere" family to bolster its position in the high-end segment. The Suprim X is an MSI exercise at leveling up to the NVIDIA Founders Edition in terms of original design and build quality. The most premium design and materials combine with the company's most advanced graphics-card cooling solution and overclocking-optimized PCB to offer the highest tier of factory overclocks.



NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti at its Computex 2021 event to answer two very specific challenges to its product stack—the Radeon RX 6900 XT outclassing the RTX 3080 and the RX 6800 performing well against the RTX 3070. The RTX 3080 Ti is designed to fill a performance gap between the RTX 3080 and the halo-segment RTX 3090.

The RTX 3080 Ti is based on the same 8 nm GA102 silicon as the RTX 3080, but features a lot more CUDA cores. More importantly, it maxes out the 384-bit wide GDDR6X memory bus of the GA102. NVIDIA is giving the card 12 GB of memory, not 24 GB like on the RTX 3090, which it considers a halo product that even targets certain professional use cases. The RTX 3080 Ti is also endowed with 320 TMUs, 320 Tensor cores, 80 RT cores, and 112 ROPs. The memory operates at the same 19 Gbps data-rate as the RTX 3080, which results in a memory bandwidth of 912 GB/s due to its increased bus width.

The MSI RTX 3080 Ti Suprim X supercharges the RTX 3080 Ti with its highest clock speeds—1830 MHz vs. 1665 MHz reference. It features the most elaborate version of the company's TriFrozr 2S cooling solution, with a metal alloy shroud, dense aluminium fin-stack heatsink, three TorX fans, similar power-delivery to the company's RTX 3090 Suprim X, and a metal back-plate. In this review, we take the card for a spin across our test-suite to tell you if shelling RTX 3090 kind of money for a top custom RTX 3080 Ti is worth it. MSI hasn't provided any pricing information yet, but we expect the card to go for around $2100, $100 more than our estimate for the NVIDIA baseline price.

Packaging

The Card

The MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Suprim X features a nearly identical board design to the RTX 3090 Suprim X. They're some of the largest graphics cards in the market, with dimensions and aesthetics that make the already large RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio look much smaller. A premium brushed aluminium shroud dominates much of the card, with cleverly designed cutouts for the vents and some sharp edges and RGB LED diffusers. The amount of RGB bling is about the same as for the Gaming X Trio, but somehow comes across as more subtle and classy.


Dimensions of the card are 33.5 x 14 cm, and it weighs 1921 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


This switch lets you select between the default "silent" BIOS and the "gaming" BIOS, which runs a more aggressive fan curve.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and one HDMI 2.1. The DisplayPort 1.4a outputs support Display Stream Compression (DSC) 1.2a, which lets you connect 4K displays at 120 Hz and 8K displays at 60 Hz. Ampere can drive two 8K displays at 60 Hz with just one cable per display.

Ampere is the first GPU to support HDMI 2.1, which increases bandwidth to 48 Gbps to support higher resolutions, like 4K144 and 8K30, with a single cable. With DSC, this goes up to 4K240 and 8K120. NVIDIA's new NVENC/NVDEC video engine is optimized to handle video tasks with minimal CPU load. The highlight here is added support for AV1 decode. Just like on Turing, you may also decode MPEG-2, VC1, VP8, VP9, H.264, and H.265 natively, at up to 8K@12-bit.

The encoder is identical to Turing. It supports H.264, H.265, and lossless at up to 8K@10-bit.


Unlike the NVIDIA Founders Edition card that introduces the new 12-pin power input, MSI sticks to the industry standard 8-pin PCIe power inputs, but there are three of these. Combined with PCIe slot power, this configuration is rated for 525 W.


The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti does not support SLI.

Teardown

Much like the RTX 3090 Suprim X, the MSI Suprim X cooling solution for the RTX 3080 Ti features two large aluminium fin stacks at both ends of the seven square heat pipes. A mirror-finish, nickel-plated copper base pulls heat from the GPU, while a flattened heat pipe runs around this plate, pulling heat from the surrounding memory chips. Thermal pads for the memory make contact with both this heat pipe and the GPU base plate. The thermal pads on the back of the cooler are 3.0 mm thick, and the thermal pads for memory and VRM on the front are 1.5 mm and 1.2 mm thick, respectively.


Here, you can see the square heatpipes—note how snugly they use the available space.


Once the main heatsink is removed, you're still left with this black stabilizer plate which helps protect the card against sagging.


A metal backplate completes the card; this card has thicker thermal pads that make up the gap of the missing rear memory chips found on the RTX 3090 Suprim X.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles, videos or forum posts.



High-res versions are also available (front, back).