MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC Review: A Cut Above
| MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC: MSRP $1,299 The MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC has unique styling and goosed-up specs that allow it to outperform standard RTX 5080 series cards.
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We first got our hands on an MSI Expert series graphics card a couple of years ago at CES. For the uninitiated, the MSI Expert series is composed of stylish graphics cards with some unique design elements and enhanced specifications, which target both gamers and creators. They’re not your typical overly-garish, gamer bling-bling products, and eschew the RGB and wild angles, in favor of more premium materials and finishes. Case in point, the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC we’ll be showing you here today.
The MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC takes everything good about the RTX 5080, but cranks up the clocks and encases all of its leading-edge tech inside a precision die-cast aluminum alloy shell, that improves structural integrity and looks great while doing it. Here’s a look at the card’s specifications, with a full tour to follow...
MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC Specifications
Most of those specifications above look just like NVIDIA’s own Founders Edition card, save for one. The number of cores, 16GB memory capacity, 30 Gbps effective memory speed, ports, interface and feature support are all the same. Where the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC differs is its maximum GPU boost clock and dimensions.
In our real-world testing, our GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition peaked at a 2,617MHz boost clock when running in its default configuration, but hovered closer to 2,580MHz most of the time. The MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC, however, features an out-of-box boost clock of 2,715MHz, that can be kicked a bit higher to 2,730MHz if you install MSI Center and enabled extreme mode. That said – as you’ll see a little later – the card actually boosts even higher than this when stock. And manual overclocking can push things much further.
The MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC measures 319 x 150 x 60 mm (effectively 3-slots wide), whereas the NVIDIA-built Founders Edition measures 304 x 137 x 40 mm (2-slots wide). The MSI card is bigger in all dimensions, but it’s not otherworldly relative to many other third-party GPU designs. What all of that extra volume affords is more room for cooling, which is really well-designed on this card.
The MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC
In terms of its outward appearance, the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC is part Dr. Jekyll and part Mr. Hyde. From some angles, the card is gorgeous in our opinion. Its die-cast aluminum alloy shell has an attractive, champagne-colored metallic finish across 3 sides, with a front fan grille that’s reminiscent of a luxury vehicle, complete with angles, chrome facets. The back side and rear of the card, however, are adorned a simple, flat matte-black finish. In a typical mid-tower setup, that means the most beautiful parts of the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC will face downward and go unseen, unfortunately. If your plan is to slap this card into a windowed chassis, make sure it’s one with a vertical mount that’ll let you show off the card’s best side.
Underneath the card’s aluminum shell there’s a large vapor chamber affixed to the RTX 5080 GPU and 16GB of GDDR7 memory, linked to a massive array of nickel-plated aluminum heatsink fins, which essentially run the entire length of the card. The heatsink is connected to the vapor chamber with square-shaped heat pipes (MSI calls them Core Pipes), and dual ball-bearing, 7-blade fans handle all of the air flow. The front fan blows air downward, directly onto the GPU and memory, while the rear fan pulls air through the open heatsink, similar to NVIDIA’s pass-through cooler design.
The MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC also features DrMOS (driver-MOSFETs) in its power circuitry and MSI claims the PCB has been “engineered with hardened circuits and optimized trace routing for performance and reliability”.
As you can see, the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Expert OC has clean lines all around, and other than the finish on the shell, the only additional adornments are some GeForce RTX branding and a square “Expert” badge on the top. That badge, however, needs to be removed to plug power into the GPU, so it’s only there to protect the power connector during shipping.
Outputs on the card include a trio of DisplayPorts (2.1b) and a single HDMI port (2.1b), which is similar to other RTX 50-series GPUs.
And with that, what do you say we get to some benchmarks?
