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A computer's microprocessor is usually busy with other work, so the graphics card handles this. The card has a chip called a Graphics Processor Unit.

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PRODUCT INFO

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X Trio

Conclusion - MSI's 1080 Ti Gaming X Trio Is The Best Looking Triple Fan Custom Graphics Card

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti has dominated the enthusiast graphics market for a whole quarter and it looks like it will keep on doing so. The graphics card is the fastest that gamers can purchase right now and even after AMD's Radeon RX Vega launch, nothing has changed for this card. Compared to the competition, the GTX 1080 Ti still feels like miles ahead and it just keeps on getting better. Today, I tested the fourth GTX 1080 Ti that I have managed to get my hands on, the MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming Trio.

The GTX 1080 Ti replaced the GTX 1080 as the fastest consumer graphics card at the same price of $699 US. The card I tested today goes for $800 US and that's a big premium you are paying for this overclocked model. The Lightning Z costs even more at $869 US but features higher clock speeds. Truth be speaking, the Lightning Z clock speeds are great but nothing that can't be achieved with a small manual overclock on the Gaming X Trio. There are some thing to note about the GTX 1080 Ti in terms of clock speeds. All cards max out around 2050-2100 MHz with the default voltage. NVIDIA is not opening voltage control any time soon so anything below the Lightning is a bit hard to over-clock. The Gaming X Trio in general was designed for users who don't want the LN2 or better mod features of the Lightning but demand a better cooler and design scheme than the Gaming X model.
Related Get The Xiaomi Air 12, Mi Notebook Pro, MSI Gaming Laptop And More On An Exclusive Limited Time Discount
The MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X Trio makes every other card seem like a generation old already even though it's utilizing the same Pascal architecture that is featured on the GTX 1080, GTX 1070 and Titan X. It offers a massive uplift to game performance and has three different profiles for gamers who want silent card operation, good gaming performance and enthusiast caliber OC performance.

But that's not it, this card allowed me to see the full potential of the Pascal GP102 chip. The card is well overclocked and ships with two additional BIOS modes in addition to the reference clock BIOS. The card gave back good overclocking figures and the performance puts it right next to the beefier Lightning X model.

As for the cooling solution, it's big improvement over the dual fan Twin Frozr. It provides superior cooling performance than the Gaming X and does so while looking phenomenal. The RGB is not over done and the Dragon cuts on the sides provide really good aesthetics of the card itself. Also, in terms of power draw, I saw a good decrease in full loads compared to the Lightning X which is due to a regular dual 8 pin interface while the Lightning required triple 8 pin connectors.
To end it up, by paying $30 more over the 1080 Ti Gaming X, the 1080 Ti Gaming X Trio gets you a better looking and triple fan cooler that embeds RGB lightning, a custom PCB that assures you great overclocking and the best graphics performance that money can buy you right now!
Once again, a solid performer by MSI that hits all the right notes by delivering a solid and refreshing new Dragon themed cooler while providing end users with great cooling and blistering fast performance that you would expect from the GTX 1080 Ti.

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MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X Trio 11 GB Graphics Card Review

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MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X Trio The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti has dominated the enthusiast graphics market for a whole quarter and it looks like it will keep on doing so. The graphics card is the fastest that gamers can purchase right now and even after AMD's Radeon RX Vega launch, nothing has changed for this card.

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The Motherboard itself is a printed circuit board that allows the CPU, RAM, and all other computer hardware components to communicate with each other.

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Posted on January 9, 2018 10:32 PM by Jamie Fletcher

NZXT makes everything around a computer. It has a diverse range of chassis designs, fans, liquid coolers, even smart fan controllers - they've even got power supplies. What was completely unexpected was treading into new territory, not with peripherals like keyboards and mice, but with a motherboard.

Specifics around the board are somewhat limited at this time, apart from a general overview of what's on offer. It's called the N7 and it will be built around Intel's Z370 chipset. NZXT's approach to the board is more centered around cooling and aesthetics. From what we are aware, it's an OEM design built by ECS (although unconfirmed), but with NZXT's input around certain features.

Being Z370, it supports the latest Coffee Lake CPUs from Intel, and Optane Memory. It has two M.2 connectors, support for multi-GPU, and supports memory up to 3866MHz. It's gone with a 15-phase VRM by Infineon, although we're not sure how it's split between CPU and memory.

The most noticeable part of the N7 is the shroud, or complete cover that warps around the board. It's very similar to that offered by ASUS with its Sabertooth range of boards. It's a metal faceplate that comes in two colors, the safe suspects of white and black, meaning it'll go with pretty much any color scheme. Additional plates are available in blue, red and purple.

The next part that sets the N7 apart is to do with the fan headers and RGB lighting control. From what can be seen, there are none fan headers dotted around the board, so the board is built around not just fan control, but also monitoring, such as with pumps. There are RGB headers as well, but we don't have much info on those at this time.

Tying it all together is likely the main reason NZXT built the board in the first place, and that's the CAM integration across the map. One of the irritating problems about RGB lighting is the non-standard implementation of it from various companies. Motherboards often play a central role in coordinating the different lighting effects, from the various lights dotted around the board, the RGB strips that are plugged in, even the memory. Companies like Corsair also have peripherals to coordinate too. Getting all of those devices talking to each other is a real pain.

NZXT would like to use its CAM software to act as a central hub for basically everything about the PC. It already has its own way of dealing with fan speeds and lighting effects through its hubs, but it seems to want to take things further with motherboard lighting and overclocking as well. CAM can already build cooling profiles, and even overclock the GPU, but overclocking the CPU and wrapping everything up into a single package means either coordinating with motherboard vendors to gain access to those functions, or, build your own motherboard - which appears what NZXT has done. NZXT has made mention that this is not really an overclocking board, but we do wonder how it plans to develop CAM in the future.

The N7-Z370 will be made around the end of the month for about $300.

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NZXT Announces Its First Motherboard - The N7 Z370

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Posted on January 9, 2018 10:32 PM by Jamie Fletcher NZXT makes everything around a computer. It has a diverse range of chassis designs, fans, liquid coolers, even smart fan controllers - they've even got power supplies. What was completely unexpected was treading into new territory, not with peripherals like keyboards and mice, but with a motherboard.

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The CPU (Central Processing Unit) is the part of a computer system that is commonly referred to as the "brains" of a computer.

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The Final Words

As we finish up out second Ryzen 7 review we can already conclude that the 1700X definitely offers a lot more value for you money. The performance metric is not far away from the 1800X at all, aside from a 200 MHz differential. At 399 USD this processor is going to be a lovely deal.

The Experience

Intel's biggest worry however isn't Ryzen, it's the fact that Intel has been charging a lot, maybe even too much money for their processors for years now, with little innovation. Intel has become increasingly agressive as hey, their desktop processors sell anyway. This results in a generic dislike towards Intel from a lot of people. This gives AMD an extra advantage as there is a proper amount of goodwill that people have towards this company. People like the underdog, especially when they bring something to the table that really impresses. So yes, if AMD plays their cards right and do not overprice their processors, they may have a colossal win at hand. That said I am also issuing a bit of a warning: we have no doubt that with the new generation processors and chipsets there are bound to be a few motherboard firmware updates and fixes for smaller bugs. Hey, it comes with the territory. We quite honestly did not run into stuff that worried us. The motherboard used seems pretty well tuned, we had no stability issues or any weird perf drops. We deliberately tested with a competing videocard (Nvidia versus AMD) as well, here again the performance is fine.

The RAW Performance

Overall we like what we are seeing with the Ryzen 7 1700X, the per core performance most certainly is good enough for what and where it needs to be. Realistically the performance overall hits an amazing sweet-spot. Combined with higher Turbo frequencies these processors shine bright. But do you need an 8-core processor for gaming? Well, probably not. But we had the very same discussion moving from two to four cores remember? So if you hang on to that thought, would you purchase a dual-core processor over a four-core one? Nope, and along these lines you need to think as we need to advance in hardware, the software will then follow in this technological evolution. I also do know that a setup like this could last you years as, again, the IPC perf is really good and you have many threads available. Since processors seem to reach frequency walls in SMT based processing, even for games it is a growing thing. Also think DirectX 12 and Vulkan here for a second, the new render APIs benefit from threaded processing.

The Gaming Performance

Yesterday we placed our finger at a sore spot, game performance in situations where you are not GPU bound compared to Intels faster quad-cores is the Achilles heel of the Ryzen 7 series. At least for now. Disabling SMT (hyper-threading) did bump up performance in some games. So there's definitely something for AMD to work on. SMT however is not the biggest culprit. It might be by design, it might be a bug, who knows. Game performance overall is good though and remember we tested with a 750 USD GeForce GTX 1080 that starts to get GPU bound at 2560x1440. But sure there is room left for improvement from the AMD side. I've stated this in the 1800X review as well, it feels like something what Nvidia has been fighting a while ago, a DPC latency issue. Next to that we find Ryzen 7 rather memory bound with fairly high memory latency in the 80 to 100ns+ ranges depending on your configuration. It is what it is though, the performance definitely is good enough for what it needs to be, but currently at 1080P with a fast enough GPU the performance lacks a little compared to where it needs to be and can be. For now we will give AMD the benefit of the doubt here, the platform is young and everything is new. The processor certainly is fast enough compared to the Intel 59xx / 69xx counterparts. We will keep an eye on this and when we have to report anything about it we'll update this content. And also in closing on this topic, if you are a little GPU bound or use 2560x1440, this pretty much is a non-issue as perf there is top notch for what the processor needs to deliver.

The Bad

If I may nitpick just a little bit then two things I find to be a bit of a mystery. Firstly, I simply would have liked to have seen quad-channel memory support. When you test a processor that is fighting the Core i7 6900K series from Intel, you would want it to have quad-channel support on the platform. It most likely was a cost saving feature as it would have required additional IO and memory controllers and more data-paths. A true fact is also that 95% of you guys that will use, say, anything from 2133 MHZ to 3200 MHz memory with two DIMMs, and you will be totally fine with the memory bandwidth as it really isn't going to restrict you with gaming aside from a 2, maybe 3% differential (at the normal gaming resolutions). It is however the content creators and video transcoders that will make a different call as there quad-channel memory really kicks in. My second remark is that i would have liked to see some more PCIe Gen 3.0 lanes on the CPU. The Ryzen processor has 24 of them, four are tied and thus linked to the chipset which leaves 20 lanes. If you run a properly fast NVMe M.2 SSD another four are used, leaving 16 for the the graphics card. Thus, in Crossfire or SLI you would be looking at two x8 PCIe Gen 3.0 lanes. Here again, that's plenty of bandwidth sure, but if AMD wanted to go that extra mile against Intel then I certainly would have appreciated two full x16 Gen 3.0 lanes. Tied to four Ryzen PCIe 3.0 lanes is the chipset, and here we find a flaw. The chipset adds PCI express lanes but they are Gen 2.0 and not Gen 3.0. This gives Intel another competitive advantage when comparing to the upper range Core i7 6000 series. For example, a secondary M.2 device would have to be linked through the chipset (as there is no room left on the processor with the graphics card utilizing a x16 PCIe link), and there your NVMe storage unit immediately runs into a restriction as the available bandwidth was just cut in half. A 3.2 GB/sec M.2 unit would do 1.6 GB/s on that connection. Still, not bad but again, wouldn't AMD like to be a step ahead of Intel? Ergo I am not happy about the fact that the chipset does not offer any PCI-Express 3.0 lanes, not even the slightest bit. Again, if you are planning to use just one high-end graphics card, one super-duper fast M.2 unit and then HDDs or SSDs for storage this entire paragraph would be irrelevant, also multi-GPU setups seem to be dying a slow death so that makes this even more irrelevant, that is the honest truth as well.

The Memory

The AMD Ryzen platform supports DDR4 1866, 2133, 2400 and even 2667 MHz straight out of the box with two DIMMs. Higher frequencies are motherboard dependant. With the initial releases you should be able to see 3200 MHz supported (OC) but we have already noticed 3766 MHz from some partners. Honestly, take a nice low latency kit as the memory frequency is not the most important thing. We are however a little surprised that AMD did not decide to go with quad-channel as an offering. It's a really cheap way to gain incredibly high memory bandwidth, even with 2133 Mhz modules. See, the higher clocked memory DIMMs are expensive and while they do offer better bandwidth, the performance increases in real-world usage will be hard to find. Unless you transcode videos over the processor a lot. DDR4 mostly was released for lower voltages and higher frequencies. 2,133 MHz CL 14/15/16 memory in combo with dual-channel will get you to 30~35 GB/sec. For gaming you will not notice huge performance improvements with higher memory bandwidth, but with content creation and video transcoding this kind of bandwidth certainly does make a difference. If you populate your Ryzen PC with four DIMMs, at the time of writing this article you are restricted to 2400 MHz modules. That number will go up once the motherboard BIOSes get more mature. So that is not a memory controller problem, more of a time restrictive thing for this rather fast launch. As always, my advice would be to go with lower clocked DDR4 memory with decent timings, but get more of it. Don't go for 8 GB, we find 16 GB the norm for a gaming rig these days. So for now, stick to two DIMMs at 8 or 16 GB per DIMM. We know the board partners are hard at work adding memory compatibility, we strongly suggest you check the QVL (Qualified Vendor List that shows compatible products) at the motherboard partner website to see what is compatible and then base your memory purchase on that. We advise you to simply insert memory frequency, timings and voltages manually for now.

The Power

With eight cores I was expecting this processor to be a power hog, but AMD's focus for the past years has been making smaller fab processes with, in the end, more energy efficient products. With this processor now fabbed at 14 nm FinFET the TDP sticks at a low 95 Watts and with the system at idle I was a little shocked, with a GeForce GTX 1080 installed / 16 GB memory / SSD and the X370 motherboard I hovered at just under 50 Watts. That's just great and that is testimony to the 14nm fabrication as smaller packages can do with less voltage. When we stressed the processor with a Prime 1024M run we reach roughly 145 Watts, that's low enough for what it needs to be, but we do find it higher than expected. Overall though this is impressive to see. When we game we hover at 260~300 Watts, but obviously that factor is dependant on the type of graphics card you use of course. So yeah, these are really good values with a many core product. No complaints here whatsoever.

The Tweak

For the 1700X we followed a request asked in our forums, we used just the Noctua heatpipe based cooler for overclocking. We reach a stable 4.0 GHz at ALL cores. However with proper liquid cooling and a lucky 1700X we have no doubt that you will reach the 4.1~4.2 GHz range on all eight-cores. This threshold is more or less the same for 8-core Intel processors, as more cores create more heat and complexity. While heatpipe cooling can be done, we do recommend liquid cooling HIGHLY as the processors do get hot. 8-cores produce heat. It's as simple as that. The Ryzen 7 1700X is easy to overclock, you could increase the voltage but we advise the AUTO voltage mode really. Then select your multiplier of choice and you are good to go. One downside is that you cannot bin the cores individually. The nature of Ryzen also will not allow independent per core overclocking as they are tied to the CCX cluster. Maybe, and again maybe, we will see some sort of CCX tweak become available where you can tweak, say, 4 cores to 4100 MHz and the other four to 3800 MHz. Time will tell, but I would find that to be a terrific alternative. I hope AMD and the board partners take up on this rather subtle hint. Delidding Ryzen - somebody is bound to ask it hence I'll address it right here and now, but delidding the processor will not be possible for the simple reason that there are sensors on the heatspreader. Delidding the processor would break it.

The Conclusion

I have to admit that I like the Ryzen 7 1700X quite a lot. It is 100 USD cheaper and offers the close to 1800X performance. It surely will reach the same tweaking levels also.

At 399 USD this CPU is over half the price of what Intel is charging, and AMD doesn't have expensive chipsets either so the motherboards will be very affordable as well. What if you are already own a 6 or 8 core Intel processor setup? Honestly, there's little to no reason for you to upgrade considering the performance overall remains at the same level, and that is the brutal honest truth. This also applies for users with a fast quad-core processor like the recent 6700K or 7700K.

The step upwards to Ryzen 7 for the folks that actually need and waited for a well deserved upgrade, the guys that have been waiting for a price/perf competitive 8-core processor series and the intent to give AMD some well-deserved support after a couple of gruesome years. In the weeks and months to come AMD will release 6-core and, later on, 4-core Ryzen processors as well. These are incredibly fascinating and exciting times for AMD. Now I did make some remarks, we find the number of PCIe 3.0 lanes rather skinny, and the chipset lanes to be sober at Gen 2. Next to that, the Ryzen processors do not offer quad-channel memory support which we feel is a miss. Also I need to make one more remark on memory, if you like to go with high frequency memory, say, 3200 MHz, you need to stick with two DIMMs for now. There is still a lot of tweaking to be done at BIOS level with a platform this young. We have no doubt that a four DIMM high frequency configuration will be supported at a later stage though. But for now four DIMMs at 2400 MHz would be the maximum (depending on motherboard manufacturer). Please base your memory purchase choices on what the motherboard manufacturer advises (check their QVL list). Your sweet spot memory might be 2667 MHz with two DIMMs. Configure the memory manually in the BIOS (freq/timings/voltage) and you should be on your way. Right, that said and done I think this conclusion page has had enough information for you to chew over. For me it is simple: If you never could afford the E series Intel platforms, here's your chance my man as Ryzen 7 and an X370 or B350 motherboard will ooze in pure value with similar to sometimes even better performance and similar features to what the competition offers.

We reiterate, game performance is not yet where it needs to be in 1080P. This is something that might be fixed with firmware and software updates as the per core performance that Ryzen offers simply can do it. This is the only real nag that we stumbled into, we'll keep you updated once AMD has solved this. Who knows, it might also be something isolated on our end but we are missing at least 10% perf here in some of the games, but not all of them. Disabling SMT can help with some game titles. Under full load processor the PC draws roughly 145 Watts, that's a little more then expected , but it's good enough. AMD is paving the way to 8-core processors at more mainstream to high-end prices. This in the end will enable many more many core builds and we project that now, more than ever, we'll see a much faster adoption rate for more threaded applications like games. This processor could be a win-win for everyone except Intel. If you like a little extra bite out of the processor, simply set your multiplier at 40, the memory at 2667 or 3000 MHz and leave the rest at default and you'll be pretty amazed as to what this setup offers with 8 cores clocking in at 4000 MHz. Value for money wise, not only are the processors are much cheaper, the motherboards and chipsets are as well. So bang for buck wise this a no brainer really.

We're following the performance metric on gaming closely though. Hopefully AMD can address that and the minute they will, we'll revisit all the gaming benchmarks. 90% of the content in this article and conclusion is similar to the 1800X as hey, the 1700X is pretty much the same thing yet clocked slightly lower. Paired with the right motherboard we feel it could be a great deal that once again oozes value.

ATH +++

- Hilbert out

"A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge."

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As we finish up out second Ryzen 7 review we can already conclude that the 1700X definitely offers a lot more value for you money. The performance metric is not far away from the 1800X at all, aside from a 200 MHz differential. At 399 USD this processor is going to be a lovely deal.