There have been some great graphics cards hitting shelves recently and now there's another one, the GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming Z card, announced by MSI.
This little gem of a card from the Taiwanese manufacturer offers an extreme core and boasts of the tech company's fastest speed card as well as premium cooling power with MSI's Twin Frozr VI thermal design.
This is thanks to the addition of the Torx Fan 2.0 which outdoes its predecessor, the Torx Fan, by 22 percent in terms of air pressure generation.
According to WCCFTech the specs are pretty neat, with the card giving a GPU base clock speed at 1771 MHz and a boost clock speed at 1911 MHz.
By comparison, the next rung down, Gaming X, has a maximum clock speed of 1708MHz base/1847MHz boost.
And IT News Online adds that the second generation Torx Fan is also much quieter than the original, which is a nice bonus.
In addition to double ball bearings, Gaming Z looks pretty cool as well, with its distinctive black and red coloring and matte texture on the back plate, which also sports an RGB LED shield. And as WCCFTech notes, the light can be set to one of 16.8 million colors to match your gaming rig.
The cooler adds a bit of weight but MSI has catered for that with a tougher back plate to give more strength to the structure.
Other specs include HDCP support and a video memory of 8 GB GDDR5X and with everything switching to VR these days, it's good that the Gaming Z card is promising a premium VR quality experience.
But be prepared to shell out a little more for the Gaming Z card over Gaming X as the Gaming Z is close to the $1000 mark at around $980. That's a hundred dollars more than the Gaming X.
Gamers may not think the price is worth it in the end with cheaper GPUs on the market.
Here's a handy summary of the specs to help you decide:
Core/Memory
- Boost Clock / Base Clock
1847 MHz / 1708 MHz (OC Mode)
1822 MHz / 1683 MHz (Gaming Mode)
1733 MHz / 1607 MHz (Silent Mode) - 8192 MB GDDR5X / 10108 MHz Memory (OC Mode)
Video Output Function
- DisplayPort x 3
- HDMI x 1
- Dual-link DVI-D x 1
Features
- Virtual Reality Ready
- DirectX 12 Ready
- Great for 4K
- Gamestream to NVIDIA SHIELD
