MSI GeForce RTX 4080 SUPRIM X Review

Ultimately, a less aggressive overclock was perfectly stable, but I am not experienced enough to know how to best approach overclocking these 40 Series GPUs. It was pretty fascinating to see, in person, just how much of a power penalty was incurred when increasing the voltage. By default this is, like the Founders Edition, a 320 W TBP card. Increasing power to 125% and voltage to +50, however, saw board power rise to 374.4 W, with 300.4 W chip power during a successful 3DMark Speed Way run.

I am curious to see how more competent people than myself fare in overclocking the RTX 4080, and for an air-cooled design there is a lot of thermal headroom available from the SUPRIM X design – not to mention power and voltage. I’m just the wrong person to test this. On the plus side, even when overclocked I saw a modest 65.6 C core, 77.9 C hot spot (in a cool 17 C room) with the default profile (max 50% fans under load). It’s a really big cooler, and if you crank up the fans there is more thermal headroom than you are ever likely to need.

One more thing: as I briefly mentioned above, MSI offers an “Extreme Performance” mode via their MSI Center software, which takes Boost up to 2640 MHz (an extra 15 MHz). Considering the very modest improvement I achieved from manual overclocking, the “Extreme Performance” mode would have a minimal impact on performance, but if you MSI Center installed anyway it can’t hurt.