Ultra-fast flash: MSI GTX 1080 Ti Lightning Z in review

1 - Einführung und Übersicht 2 - Platine und Spannungsversorgung im Detail 3 - Gaming-Performance WQHD 4 - Gaming-Performance UHD 5 - Leistungsaufnahme im Detail 6 - Temperaturen, Taktraten, OC und Wärmebildanalyse 7 - Kühlerdetails und Geräuschentwicklung 8 - Zusammenfassung und Fazit

With the Lightning z, MSI really played with the muscles, which you also need as a customer when unpacking this chunk of graphics card. With a combat weight of just under 1.7 kilograms, the card competes to conquer the PCs of the world – provided the necessary small money of the buyers. The specifications for the CPU clock are rather waste here, because the massive cooler will easily catapult this air-cooled card to the top, that should be spoiled here beforehand.

Nvidia's Boost can therefore be relied on once again, because the high power target of 300 watts ex works, together with a chip well selected according to the manufacturer and the appropriate cooling, is a guarantee for very high, actually achievable clock values in load operation for the Gpu. In addition, MSI has overclocked the memory a bit, which of course is very much in the way of graphics performance.

Since the actual performance of all board partner cards depends more on the actual boost clock achieved, and thus causally depends on the cooling, the power target and above all the quality of the respective chip, any test based only on benchmark bars is more of a Random snapshot of a single specimen. This is precisely why we have focused on the actual technical implementation of each model and have been able to document this very well with our equipment. Exceptions confirm the rule.

Unboxing, dimensions and connections

MSI first supplies a lot of accessories, which ranges from a real 3-slot aperture in matt black to various color applications with which you can still do some customizing, apart from the external connections for voltage control.

However, we will discuss the board and cooling design separately later. The most important features are first summarized in a table:

Exterior views

Now let's look at the map from the outside. MSI relies on a matte, graphite-coloured plastic cover that is still in order haptically and visually. The silver appliqués can be changed in colour, depending on the taste. The huge, wraparound insert made of milky white plastic is multicolored RGB illuminated, which also includes the Lightning lettering on the back of the backplate. Visually, this is the upper limit of what is tolerable in illumination, but still looks good.

The cooling fins are vertically aligned, the three 8-pin sockets of the external power supply are installed rotated by 180°.

The connections rely on two HDMI outputs, e.g. VR glasses should be a good thing.

Specifications

The GPU-Z screenshot shows us the most important key data in advance, whereby the actual boost achieved for our model was significantly higher than with all previously tested air-cooled models. This in turn relativizes such theoretical data a little, so that we really want to refer to the following test results later:

Finally, the whole thing again as a tabular comparison to the other relevant graphics card models:

Test system and measurement methods

The new test system and the methodology have already been described in great detail in the basic article "How We Test Graphics Cards" (English: "How We Test Graphics Cards") and therefore, for the sake of simplicity, we now only refer to this detailed Description. So if you want to read everything again, you are welcome to do so. However, we have improved CPU and cooling once again in order to largely exclude possible CPU bottle necks for this fast card.

If you are interested, the summary in table form quickly provides a brief overview: