You've decided you need a GPU, doesn't matter the cost, doesn't matter that they're impossible to find,
or maybe you're from the future and GPUs are everywhere.
You could pick them up off the ground, but you don't know which one to pick.
Well, we're gonna help you narrow down your decision by unboxing three different 5080s today,
and then we're gonna drag race them with the help of John from Labs.
Let's start with the MSI Vanguard. This is the launch edition.
The tape is of our own doing. The launch edition comes with some extra goodies,
like a massive box. The one that you'll get in the non-launch edition
is much more normal. And the reason the box is so big is because it comes with a lucky mystery box.
So we'll see which kind of model we get later. There's nine different types and the one secret type.
We also get a card that says welcome on board and an adapter, cool.
We get this MSI anti-sag stand.
You kind of screw it and then you can set the height of your GPU so that it doesn't sag
because it looks like it's gonna be fricking huge.
Good Lord. Look at the size of this thing.
It's 14.1 inches long and 5.9 inches tall.
And it's about to looks like a four slot,
maybe three and a half slot GPU, but really that just means it's four slots.
This is so big. We'll see if this size is going to translate
into better thermals and quieter operation. It likely will, especially when you consider
that the PCB ends here and the rest of this is just flow through cooler.
In terms of looks, I like it. It's got some cool carbon fiber
as well as some kind of like angular actiony kind of stuff. Like this, like the curvature of a fan is kind of accentuated.
I think it does look pretty cool. It is also just so, so big.
We'll talk a bit more about specs and features when we get the rest of them unboxed. Our next one is the Zotec AMP Xtreme Infinity 5080.
To gaming and beyond, we got documentation.
Oh, and we're right to the card. It seems that it also comes with a anti-sag bracket.
We also have an RGB adapter along with a power adapter.
Let's take a look at the, oh, that's heavy.
Or maybe it's just dense. I don't know. I feel like the MSI one is probably heavy, but it was much bigger.
This seems more reasonably sized. This is 13.1 by 5.4
and also looks like a triple slot a little bit more than that.
So it is quite a bit more compact than the MSI. I think this actually looks much classier.
This is very nice looking. I think that the color scheme of the kind of gold
and gunmetal gray looks pretty cool.
It is a dense heat sink. The PCB is definitely, I feel like it's longer,
but you still get an amp, a decent amount of flow through. And apparently this is an Infinity mirror.
The only other thing of note really is that the power connector on this is upside down
compared to the usual implementation with the sense pins on the top. There's a little button
for their one click OC dual BIOS thing. And then here's where the RGB plugs in.
I would say not the most ideal place to have your RGB cable come out
because it's going to be facing directly
towards everyone else. It would have been nice if they could have put it on like this corner
or something like that. I, you know, maybe make like a ribbon cable
that runs across it. And it is what it is.
But you know what this is? It's the colorful iGameUltra W, which means white.
And I think is a cool looking card.
This is the most traditional packaging of any of them.
That was a bit awful noise. We got some kind of digitized spray paint type looking stuff.
Then inside we get quick materials,
a white sleeved power connector, which is nice.
Though I will say that the color matching on the cables
is a little bit less than ideal. This is really looking like hockey tape
compared to the more pure whites of the rest of the plastics.
The GPU, however, looks pretty cool. A pretty dazzling, almost a chromatic effect to it.
There's kind of these reflective bits of text on this plastic see-through shroud.
Now you might think because of what the box looks like that this would have some sort of lighting behind it.
It turns out it doesn't. That's the pictures just kind of a lie,
which is kind of a bummer. It's 13 by 5.5 inches and it is a triple slot
and maybe a little bit card on the back.
You know, kind of disappointing that we have this metal. Here you won't really see it in your build,
but if you were going for all white and you'd have like a white PCIe cover,
it would be nice to have this kind of match. Outside of that, this is probably the most compact
of the three cards we've looked at and definitely the most spunky.
They call it a hip hop aesthetic. John calls it Sakura Graffiti,
which is honestly better branding than what they've come up with.
It's got a button for turbo and normal switch between the dual bioses.
Cool. Well, I guess that the last thing we have to do is get them running.
Each of these cards are OC models and so they all come with varying different boost clocks.
The boost clock of the MSI is 2745, but you can only get that clock speed
when you are using their MSI center app. You still get the highest clocks of any of them
without it at 2730, but all those 15 megahertz will make a real difference.
I'm sure the Zotag is 2670 megahertz and the Colorful iGame has a boost clock of 2655 megahertz.
The Colorful one, despite having the lowest clocks, has the highest power rating at 380 watts.
The other two cards are at 360 watts, which is the same as a Founders Edition card.
Not really sure why. Okay, cyberpunk's done, let's see how we did.
And it looks like the best performer was the Zotag at 156 FPS average.
The MSI came in second at 154 FPS and the Colorful came in at 153.
Interesting that the highest clocked one didn't win, but they're all basically performed the same.
You'll expect a little bit of variance on the test, probably about two to three FPS,
so effectively they're all the same. Normally we run the same game multiple times,
then average it, so it's a good chance that we'd probably end up with the same number for all.
Well, let's try it at 4K and see if that makes a difference. Yeah.
Cyberpunk 4K, three, two, one, go. It's time for RGB evaluation.
The MSI, I think this looks pretty nice. It'll probably look really good in a case
when it's more diffuse. This little plastic glowy thing looks cheap.
It looks like something you'd get on Timu. The Zotac light bar, simple, looks good.
I wish the diffusion was a little bit smoother here. You can kind of see the individual LEDs,
but let's take a look at the Infinity Mirror. It looks cool.
You're never gonna see it. I guess if you have like a fish tank kind of PC,
like a O11 dynamic, you would be able to see the front of it.
It would be cooler to have it on the side, I think,
but still my favorite looking card of the bunch. And the Colorful iGame Ultra,
while I really do wish there was some sort of RGB on the face of the card,
on the side you do get this cool iGame Ultra kind of text
that is pretty nice though. Is this like GeForce RTX placement mandatory?
It's not. Maybe it is.
Because I think that this is a really unfortunate placement for it because it's blocking the like RGB pattern.
Maybe it's not their fault. Maybe NVIDIA is forcing them to do it. That's why I call GeForce.
Oh my, that's a good one, Andy. Let's look at the results in 4K and it is even closer than it was in 1440p.
So 72.6 on the Colorful,
72.78 on the Zotac,
and MSI at 71.92, ooh.
Again, these are just average FPS, 1% lows are probably a little bit more important.
This doesn't give us a 1% low, it does give us a minimum, which is the worst it performed.
This one gets 59.32, 59.34, 58.44.
They're the same GPU. And guess what? What?
They're basically the same as the Founder's Edition too. Really? If you look here on the LTT Labs site,
our 5080 Founder's Edition did 58.73.
So basically the same. Now granted, this is with probably an older version
of the game or older driver. So, but...
So that's one FPS you could get. Potentially. For free.
Well, or for the price of whatever these are. Maybe we'll see a bigger difference in a different game.
For our next test, we are doing Returnal at 4K with Epic Ray Tracing.
Three, two, one, go. While we're waiting for Returnal to run,
we're gonna open our lucky and see what we got. John says he wants the Shanghai Lucky.
I want the Boba Lucky or the Mystery Lucky because I want to know what it is.
We got Hollywood Lucky.
Wow. Let's look at the results. 77, 77, 77.
If there was a question as to like, whether any of these different models
have an appreciable performance delta out of the box,
not really. The main thing that you're gonna be considering when you're buying one of these GPUs is the features.
Like, do you like the way it looks? Do you enjoy having the extra dual biosis?
Do you enjoy the software that it comes packaged in? MSI has a far more robust software suite
than Zotac or Colorful, but maybe you want something that's more lightweight.
Other things to consider are just the size of them. MSI is huge.
Whereas the Zotac and Colorful are far more reasonable,
even though they are also still large. However, there's one more consideration
that we need to take into account. And that's thermals. We did some thermal testing in advance
and we just tested them as they were out of the box, which meant that the MSI was in a silent BIOS,
the Zotac was in its OC BIOS, and the Colorful was in its default BIOS.
So performance could vary. We also didn't adjust fan profiles
or anything like that either. And in F1, we saw the Zotac pulling an average
of 66 degrees Celsius with a max of 67 degrees Celsius.
The Colorful, 62 degrees Celsius and 64 degrees Celsius.
And the MSI was at an average of 62 and max of 65.
This is still well below the 80 degree limit before they start card start downclocking.
Johnny, I don't know if you agree, but they're not loud. No, the fan that you're actually hearing right now
is actually just the knock to a fans. Thermally, it seems that all of these cards
do a pretty dang good job of keeping the card cool.
I do want to see how annoying they get if we crank the fans up though.
So let's tinker. This is the sound of the Zotac.
It's not that bad. I have a 7900 XTX.
It's obviously a much smaller card. It's only a two slot card,
but the fans at full speed are way whineier than this.
And I'd say that this is like obviously quite loud, not pleasant, but by default, they'll never run like this.
And I've just heard worse. Let's see what the Colorful sounds like.
It's got the most whoosh. It sounds the most like white noise though.
I think it's probably the most pleasant of all of them. There is a slight high-pitched resonance.
Like it. It's like a whoosh, but mostly it's just a whoosh noise,
which is actually pretty pleasant. And finally, the MSI card.
It is, I think, quieter than the Zotac and perhaps overall a little bit lower of a pitch.
I don't know if it comes through, but there is kind of this like very high-pitched whistling
that's like do, do, do, do, do, do. It's happening that you don't hear
when it's running slower. It's really subtle. You might not even notice it in a case
or something like that. Definitely the Zotac is the loudest. I will say the Zotac is the worst sounding and the loudest,
which is a bit of a bummer because it looks so dang classy. But also, you probably don't need to run your fans
at 100% ever on a cooler this big. Your mileage may vary.
So they're all essentially the same.
So how do you choose a card? I'd say probably aesthetics and cost over anything.
On top of watching media reviews, you should also look up owner reviews
because there's some things that we just can't test. Like how was this card gonna be after six, seven months of the fans running all the time?
How expensive are these? Current pricing is still pretty gnarly. The MSI comes in at $1,440
and the Zotac comes in at $1,450. So $10 more.
Both of those prices are really gnarly considering that this was supposed to be a $1,000 card.
Give or take the AIB tax. The colorful, however, is not available in North America.
And depending on the region you're buying it in, it can be anywhere from $1,200 US dollars to $1,700 US dollars.
That is insane. So I think I agree with you.
I would probably pick the Zotac as well, mainly because I am a sucker for aesthetics.
If I could get that for $1,200, I would deal with it the way it looks.
That was a lot to get through. And if you want more GPU reviews to help determine which one you should buy,
you can go check out lots of reviews on the LTT Labs website, LTTLabs.com.
These ones will be coming soon there. They're not up yet, but keep an eye out.
Thanks for watching ShortCircuit. This is the first time we've done a video in this kind of format.
So let us know in the comments if you liked it. And if you did like it and you want to watch more stuff with Labs,
check out our oscilloscope unboxing that we did just a couple of weeks ago.