A Closer Look

MSI's thermal solution uses six heatpipes, of which three are thicker and extended in length for improved cooling performance.


Once the main heatsink is removed, a black metal baseplate becomes visible, which provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate is made from metal to protect the card against damage during installation and handling. It includes a heatpipe which cools the back of the PCB and also helps with GPU cooling, thanks to thermal pads on the back of the GPU.


MSI upgraded the power configuration of their MSI GTX 1080 Ti Lightning to three 8-pins, which combined with slot power can supply up to 525 W of power.


A BIOS switch is located near the SLI fingers. It lets you switch between the default BIOS and an LN2 BIOS with no OCP and temperature limit.


MSI has included three voltage measurement points near the back of the card.


With Pascal, NVIDIA made some changes to how SLI works. In a nutshell, for 4K at 60 Hz and above, NVIDIA recommends new high-bandwidth SLI bridges it dubbed "SLI HB." These bridges occupy both SLI fingers. Traditional triple- and quad-SLI setups are gone as well. Only certain benchmarks can run more than the dual-SLI setup to which all games are limited.