Introduction

The new MSI GeForce RTX 4080 Super Expert graphics card releasing today, introduces the company’s latest attempt at an ultra-premium custom design tier. MSI is among the few NVIDIA board partners that’s been making serious efforts to beat the NVIDIA Founders Edition in aesthetics and cooling performance. The new Expert brand sits alongside the company’s SUPRIM X and SUPRIM Liquid tiers. It’s also the first GeForce RTX product from the company to feature the MSI PRO logo that’s usually found in notebooks, monitors, and pre-built desktops from the company targeted at the workstation and creator PC market segments. So the MSI RTX 4080 Super Expert is meant for the high-end gaming PC crowd that does quite a bit of creator work on the side, paired with NVIDIA’s Studio drivers.

As for the GeForce RTX 4080 Super, it sits at the top of the Super series mid-lifecycle refresh of the RTX 40-series Ada. This refresh aims to being more performance at existing or lower price points. The RTX 4080 Super is recommended by NVIDIA for maxed out gaming at the 4K Ultra HD resolution, including with ray tracing. It is built on the same AD103 silicon as the original RTX 4080, but maxes it out, enabling all its available shaders. Perhaps the best aspect of the RTX 4080 Super isn’t this increase in shaders, but a lowering in its MSRP to $1,000, from the $1,200 that the RTX 4080 launched at. This ensures that premium custom-design cards such as the MSI RTX 4080 Super Expert we’re reviewing here, are priced similar to the original baseline price of the RTX 4080.

The GeForce RTX 4080 Super is being introduced to cement NVIDIA’s competitive proposition against the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which can be often found around the $900 mark. The company probably felt that it didn’t need to tap into the larger AD102 silicon driving the RTX 4090, to do this. Instead, the RTX 4080 Super enables all 80 SM physically present on the AD103, when compared to the RTX 4080 that nearly maxed it out with 76; and lower the baseline price of the resulting product by 20%. With 80 SM, the RTX 4080 Super enjoys some eye-pleasing counts of 10,240 CUDA cores, 320 Tensor cores, 80 RT cores, 320 TMUs, and 112 ROPs. The memory size is unchanged at 16 GB, across the chip’s full 256-bit memory interface, cushioned by the 64 MB on-die cache; however NVIDIA has slightly increased the memory speed to 23 Gbps, over the 22.4 Gbps of the original RTX 4080. The Super refresh doesn’t change the underlying Ada Lovelace graphics architecture, including its new CUDA cores that support shader execution reordering; new RT cores that support displaced micro-meshes that enable increase in complexity of ray traced objects; and optical flow accelerator, which enables the new DLSS 3 Frame Generation feature.

The MSI GeForce RTX 4080 Super Expert board design is perhaps the most truthful adaptation of the dual-axial flow-through cooler architecture introduced by NVIDIA with its past two generations of Founders Edition graphics cards. In fact, it takes the concept up a notch, and minimizes lateral ventilation from the sides of the card. There are two large fans on this triple-slot cooler; the first one is on the obverse side of the card, and toward the front end. It draws fresh air onto the heatsink underneath; which is ventilated from the cutouts in the rear I/O shield. The second fan is located on the reverse side, pulling air through the heatsink, through a large vent on the obverse side. The MSI Expert card also comes with factory overclocked speeds, with the GPU running at 2610 MHz boost frequency, compared to 2550 MHz reference. The company is pricing the card at $1150, a premium over the $1,000 baseline.