MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti LIGHTNING Z Video Card Review

I really feel silicon lottery is the only thing relevant to the performance of these high end 1080 Tis. My STRIX OC does 2076Mhz and 12Ghz memory at stock voltage. If I were to crank the fans to 100%, temps never go above like 43c. I use a custom fan curve which goes 0% fan speed up to 35c, then it jumps to 30% and climbs with a peak of 100% at 80c. It never goes above 42c while gaming like this. Benchmarking it caps at 48c. And since I paid $780 for this card, it puts the MSI to shame.

But again, truth is this is all about silicon lottery. I got fairly lucky with this card, could probably hit 2100Mhz stable if I touched voltage, but I just don't care. It isn't worth the reduced lifespan and added heat. Hell, I undervolt mine most of the time for casual gaming since the excess power isn't always needed. 1671Mhz at 0.800v makes the card physically silent as it sips power, shaving over 125w off the wall and drastically reducing temps. Coil whine vanishes as well. All the while getting better performance than a Founder's Edition 1080 Ti with a fraction of the noise footprint.
 
The Lightning runs much quieter and cooler than the Gigabyte.
Running my gigabyte on 100%, you cannot hear the difference, unless you listen real close, and the case is off.
This may not be the most scientific way, but is all I have to measure sound by. This is with my phone
sitting directly on the card.
Temp wise. The highest temp I have reached so far is 96F.

 
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Checking the price of the card.... $870 on NewEgg. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I could have sworn that the earlier 1080Tis were priced around the low $720s.

Shrug.... It's no secret that I've been planning on replacing my old 980 card with a 1080Ti at the end of the year. I wonder, at the current price points, how viable the plan is at this point considering the cybercurrency mining craze.
 
I'd get this if I wasn't now hooked on the AIO water cooling options.....speaking of, I'm guessing the MSI/Corsair will come up to that 10% faster than FE number, but not sure it will do the 16 to 20% increases this card seems to deliver with its power profiles.....or am I misreading?
 
So what do you call 2050? :cool:

Depends on how much you pay for the hardware. Many people are getting 2050/63 clocks from reference cards or other AIB solutions that are sub-800. Paying 870 for 2063 is ridiculous and that too at 100% fan speed w/ 3 fans. Must be a jet engine in there.
 
I was considering this card a while back but the issue with all these GTX 1080 Ti cards is that all of them run very high temperatures and it becomes a space heater. My 1080 runs the highest at 76 degrees. But it just seems the norm is about 80c+ for these cards. I might just wait for the next generation of cards.
 
I was considering this card a while back but the issue with all these GTX 1080 Ti cards is that all of them run very high temperatures and it becomes a space heater. My 1080 runs the highest at 76 degrees. But it just seems the norm is about 80c+ for these cards. I might just wait for the next generation of cards.
Things are not going to get much better temperature wise as transistor density continues to increase. We're pretty much stuck with a monstrosity of an air cooler or the complexity of water cooling to cool these cards efficiently.
 
Depends on how much you pay for the hardware. Many people are getting 2050/63 clocks from reference cards or other AIB solutions that are sub-800. Paying 870 for 2063 is ridiculous and that too at 100% fan speed w/ 3 fans. Must be a jet engine in there.

I paid the extra funds because i have no plans to go to watercooling, and this particular gpu fit well with my "theme" I guess. At the time the closest card i wanted was only 40 bucks under, and I preferred the looks of the MSI. I could go on a long history how what my temps were dating... too far back. But that wouldn't be fair, so I will just have to compare my gigabyte g1 1080 and the msi lightning z 1080 ti for heat.

Point blank, the 1080 TI with fans off runs around 3c lower than the g1 1080 with 40% fan speed. For whatever you wanna call it, in the exact same tower/system with absolutely nothing else changed, that are the results of my idle temps. In gaming I never reach 60s, and at the highest the fans went up to around 63% to do that. The G1 1080 could not compete with that, and went even higher in rpms and noise to keep it around 70c in gaming. The temp comparisons were in the same games, benchies, etc.

The cooling is top notch for the lightning z for air and I was going for that in particular. I hit and stay at 2088mhz while gaming without dips, and while I would of loved to have gotten it cheaper I don't feel any more robbed given the current pricing issue going on.

They are out of stock in newegg so I doubt anyone will need to worry about the pricing any longer.
 
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I paid the extra funds because i have no plans to go to watercooling, and this particular gpu fit well with my "theme" I guess. At the time the closest card i wanted was only 40 bucks under, and I preferred the looks of the MSI. I could go on a long history how what my temps were dating... too far back. But that wouldn't be fair, so I will just have to compare my gigabyte g1 1080 and the msi lightning z 1080 ti for heat.

Point blank, the 1080 TI with fans off runs around 3c lower than the g1 1080 with 40% fan speed. For whatever you wanna call it, in the exact same tower/system with absolutely nothing else changed, that are the results of my idle temps. In gaming I never reach 60s, and at the highest the fans went up to around 63% to do that. The G1 1080 could not compete with that, and went even higher in rpms and noise to keep it around 70c in gaming. The temp comparisons were in the same games, benchies, etc.

The cooling is top notch for the lightning z for air and I was going for that in particular. I hit and stay at 2088mhz while gaming without dips, and while I would of loved to have gotten it cheaper I don't feel any more robbed given the current pricing issue going on.

They are out of stock in newegg so I doubt anyone will need to worry about the pricing any longer.

Cool enjoy the card. 2088 on air is good. 63 C is also good. My ASUS STRIX hovers around 65-70 C depending on game and how far I am pushing the card. I also paid a decent dime for it (779 or something I remember) and got it for the silence and lower temps compared to MSI Gaming X which had poor acoustics, temperatures and overclocked like a turd (won't go past 1949 or something).
 
Cool enjoy the card. 2088 on air is good. 63 C is also good. My ASUS STRIX hovers around 65-70 C depending on game and how far I am pushing the card. I also paid a decent dime for it (779 or something I remember) and got it for the silence and lower temps compared to MSI Gaming X which had poor acoustics, temperatures and overclocked like a turd (won't go past 1949 or something).

Many thanks! And I hope you're enjoying yours as well. I am pretty satisfied with the purchase, but I do tend to wish it was... cheaper. I was eyeballing the Asus Strix myself, least the OC version, which was 829 on newegg, about 860 if include tax on amazon. I figure someone would of scoffed at my mention of idle temps but I was attuning that to how efficient the passive cooling was along with the active 3 fans in regards to temps/noise. I think i would have been happy with the Strix too. But yeah, I think the card hit my expectations, cept for the price perhaps.
 
Damn, and to think that if that 12.5GHz memory speed was on the full-fat 384-bit bus, you'd be seeing 600GB/s bandwidth...
 
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