MSI GeForce RTX 4080 Super Expert graphics card

The new MSI GeForce RTX 4080 Super Expert graphics card releasing today introduces the company's latest attempt at an ultra-premium custom design tier. MSI is among the few NVIDIA board partners that's been making serious efforts to beat the NVIDIA Founders Edition in aesthetics and cooling performance. The new Expert brand sits alongside the company's SUPRIM X and SUPRIM Liquid tiers. It's also the first GeForce RTX product from the company to feature the MSI PRO logo that's usually found in notebooks monitors and pre-built desktops from the company targeted at the workstation and creator PC market segments. So the MSI RTX 4080 Super Expert is meant for the high-end gaming PC crowd that does quite a bit of creator work on the side paired with NVIDIA's Studio drivers.

As for the GeForce RTX 4080 Super it sits at the top of the Super series mid-lifecycle refresh of the RTX 40-series Ada. This refresh aims to being more performance at existing or lower price points. The RTX 4080 Super is recommended by NVIDIA for maxed out gaming at the 4K Ultra HD resolution including with ray tracing. It is built on the same AD103 silicon as the original RTX 4080 but maxes it out enabling all its available shaders. Perhaps the best aspect of the RTX 4080 Super isn't this increase in shaders but a lowering in its MSRP to $1000 from the $1200 that the RTX 4080 launched at. This ensures that premium custom-design cards such as the MSI RTX 4080 Super Expert we're reviewing here are priced similar to the original baseline price of the RTX 4080.