At both stock and overclocked, it maintained 58 degrees Celsius on my test bench. Where the Suprim X claims a dominating victory is thermals. MSI’s Suprim X was the raw winner in clock speed, but it’s hard to call it a victory considering how close my results are. That difference is usually what you would see with board partner cards, but Nvidia’s first-party offerings have gotten more aggressive with factory overclocks over the last few generations. What’s interesting is that even the Founder’s Edition model climbed somewhere around 200MHz higher than the listed boost clock speed. Image used with permission by copyright holderįor clock speed, all three models basically produced the same results. The PNY model was allowed to boost highest, though those few extra watts didn’t translate into performance. Out of the three I tested, the Suprim X actually maintained the same power draw at both stock and overclocked in Cyberpunk 2077, despite offering higher clock speeds. Even with a moderate overclock, the card hovers around 280 watts to 290W, which seems like the sweet spot for efficiency. Nvidia got a reputation for unhinged power demands with its RTX 30-series GPUs, but the RTX 4080 is remarkably efficient. The larger differences between RTX 4080 models comes down to thermals and clock speed, though surprisingly not power. Power, clock speeds, and thermals Image used with permission by copyright holder The RTX 4080 rarely goes up to its full 320 watts of power, and my data suggests it’s most efficient slightly lower. The MSI Suprim X, for example, offers a BIOS toggle for Silent and Gaming modes depending on what you’re doing. If anything, cards that offer more efficient operating modes are the way to go. In short, don’t be turned off by the 5% gap between the Founder’s Edition and PNY card - it’s a slight difference that doesn’t show up in actual games. Jacob Roach / Digital TrendsĪlthough some beefy overclocked models like the Asus ROG Strix may be able to provide slightly better performance, that extra performance is largely coming on the back of the cooler. The clock speed translated, as I’ll dig into in a later section, but that doesn’t always manifest as real-world performance. The PNY card didn’t take to the overclock as well, allowing the Founder’s Edition design to enjoy a 5% lead in Time Spy.įor my overclock, I pushed an extra 115MHz on the cores, as well as a 300MHz bump to the memory speed. When pushed with a slight overclock, the Founder’s Edition design actually overtakes the Suprim X, though only by a razor-thin margin.

What’s surprising is that PNY’s card is in last place, even compared to the Founder’s Edition design. In both 3DMark Time Spy and Port Royal, the MSI Suprim X outpaced the other two models (though only by 4% at most). Synthetic benchmarks show larger differences.

Rtx 4080 now in stock