Conclusion

Rather than focus on all-out performance, the Gaming X strikes a very good balance between speed, temperatures and noise....

The MSI Gaming X is the fourth GeForce GTX 1080 to pass through our labs. It isn't the fastest or cheapest of the quartet but is extremely well made and, subjectively, the prettiest of the bunch.

Rather than focus on all-out performance, the Gaming X strikes a very good balance between speed, temperatures and noise. The card's fans can barely be heard when the GPU is running full chat, so anyone who wants a quiet GTX 1080-based system will be served well by this £630 offering.

What's become clear to us after reviewing four GTX 1080s is that absolute performance - overclocked or otherwise - is similar between the cards; you gain a couple of frames here, lose them there, meaning the real differentiators are how much you value a particular brand, aesthetics and temperature/noise characteristics. MSI scores highly on each of these non-Nvidia-related fronts through applying its Twin Frozr VI technology that will inevitably also find its way on to the GTX 1070 variant.

No single card can be all things to all enthusiasts. If you want the fastest GTX 1080 out of the box, look elsewhere. If you want a well-balanced card that looks good and is oh so quiet when doling out 4K frame rates, the MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X is our current favourite.

The Good		The Bad
Beautiful build quality LEDs work well Fans turn off at idle Very, very quiet under load Software OC mode		Limited OC potential on core

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X

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The MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X graphics card is available to purchase from Ebuyer.

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There are two Gaming-series cards - X and non-X - differentiated the the X variant carrying a backplate and an elevated core frequency. Speaking of which, the APP suite controls the specification of the card. As standard and out of the box, the Gaming X runs at 1,683MHz and 1,822MHz for base and boost, respectively. This can be changed to 1,708/1,847MHz in OC mode along with a 108MHz bump to the 10,000MHz GDDR5X memory, while dropping it down to Silent ensures the card runs at 1,607/1,733MHz, or at reference speeds. Our sample shipped with the correct default clocks.

Kudos for checking and explaining this. I wonder how the app suite will play with driver updates direct from nVidia in the future?

FWIW, our sample scored 97.4 per cent (a pass) in the 3DMark Stress Test. I'll begin adding it into reviews once a few more cards have come and gone, to give it some context.

I guess what we're seeing consistently is that there is no graphics card yet capable of powering 4K at high enough refresh rate - at least with all the GFX settings up. 60Hz is not enough. 1440p with some reduced settings appears to be the sweet spot just now, but with the obscene cost because of lack of competition from AMD, it's not moving fast enough at the high end IMO. At this rate, we'll have 4K/120Hz/GSync IPS displays with professional-quality colour representation at an affordable price before we have the graphics cards able to satisfy them!

If this is repeating myself - apologies; just registered and I don't know if my first post… posted.

I think that unless you are going 3D (and to be fair my 3D vision 2 glasses are gathering dust) a consistent 60FPS is OK; the unfortunate thing is that cutting aside all the hype the GTX1080, whilst being an absolute beast of a card, still does not deliver that at 4k with all the settings on max. I am running a Titan X at 1440p and the GTX 1080 IS actually faster than the Titan X (did a Metro Last Light Benchmark with all max settings and the 1080 had a 6-7 FPS lead). Would be very interested on people's thoughts regarding SLI 1080s as there is too much hype via review sites to get any kind of real-world, unbiased review (remember the “1080 is 2x the performance of Titan X” nonsense everyone was spouting and it turned out it was for one aspect of VR). Personally - I returned the 1080 (cost not worth the 10% performance boost) and will await a next-gen Titan which should hopefully give me a 20-30% boost over my T-X. Having said this - I am still running a 1440p monitor as I don't think any single card will be able to run 4k at 60FPS consistently with all settings turned up for at least one and possibly two chip generations. NVIDIA have a habit of releasing a whopper (i.e. GTX 1080) followed by a considerably underwhelming generation or two thereafter. So I expect the “next 1080” to be the real 4k card.

Looks like Brexit has had an immediate knock on with prices, gone up £60 since last thursday.

I guess I won't be buying a new GFX card afterall :(