Component maker MSI has clearly been taking notes on Nvidia’s Founders Edition coolers, as the new MSI RTX 4080 Super Expert features a very similar design. Not only that, but the specs for MSI’s card, which we first saw on display at CES, have just leaked, and it’s going to be faster than the forthcoming Founders Edition of the Nvidia RTX 4080 Super.
The RTX 4080 Super is due to be launched on January 31, 2024, with a thankfully better spec and cheaper price than the original RTX 4080. The new Nvidia GPU may well even make it onto our best graphics card guide if it can live up to expectations. The standard RTX 4080 Super spec has 10,240 CUDA cores, 16GB of GDDR6X memory running at 23Gbps effective, and a boost clock of 2550MHz.
However, the MSI Expert card goes one step further, reportedly adding a 60MHz overclock to the boost frequency, meaning it can boost to 2,610MHz. You’ll also be able to add another 15MHz to this clock speed if you enable the Extreme Performance mode in the company’s MSI Center software package, bringing you a 2,625MHz boost clock – that’s a healthy 75MHz improvement.
The MSI GeForce RTX 4080 Super Expert specs have just been leaked on X (formerly Twitter) by wxnod, and they also reveal the sheer size of this new card. It’s well over a foot long, with a length of 336mm, and it has a width of 142mm as well. That’s a big card – as a point of comparison, the forthcoming RTX 4080 Super Founders Edition is more compact, with a length of 304mm and width of 137mm.
It’s the cooler itself that’s really interesting, though, as you can see in the video from YouTuber PC Centric at CES above. We’re used to seeing coolers that fully encase their PCBs from Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards, but third-party cards usually stick to the standard backplate, PCB, then heatsinks and fans arrangement, with open ends at the edges.
Instead, with this design, MSI has followed the principles of Nvidia’s flow-through cooler, with a fan on either side of the PCB, and a shroud that encases the whole PCB. The MSI Expert card is tall according to the leaked specs as well, measuring 78mm, which means the card will take up the room of 3.5 (effectively four) expansion slots.
There’s no word on pricing yet, but as it’s overclocked, the MSI GeForce RTX 4080 Super Expert is likely to be more expensive than the $999 MSRP for the RTX 4080 Super Founders Edition. Let’s also hope that MSI doesn’t have to issue a new vbios at the last minute in order to fix the performance of this card, as it did with its new RTX 4070 Ti Super cards.
We’ll have to wait until we see how the new RTX 4080 Super performs, but in the meantime, you can check out our full RTX 4070 Super review, as well as our AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT review at the cheaper end of the scale.