The Nvidia RTX 3080 is one of the best graphics cards the Team GeForce has ever produced. Which makes it even more sad that for much of its lifetime it's been almost impossible to find in stock, and if you could it's always way more than its $699 MSRP.
That historical, never-to-be-seen-again MSRP, might make the MSI RTX 3080 Gaming Z Trio for $850 at Gamestop seem like a rip-off, but considering the state of the GPU market it's actually a good price in 2022. The RTX 3080 Ti launched at $1,200, and this overclocked MSI card was once retailing for $100 more than that at the height of the stock crisis.
That overinflates the saving somewhat, but it's still closer to the reference Founders Edition pricing than any other RTX 3080 card we've seen this year, let alone this Memorial Day.
It's also worth remember that this is an overclocked version of Nvidia's Ampere GPU, which always command premium pricing. That means it's running at 1,830MHz in terms of Boost clock, which is some 120MHz higher than the reference clocked Founders Edition card. That base card was still able to actually achieve average gaming clock speeds of 1,842MHz in our testing, so you'd expect the excellent triple-fan cooling of the MSI version to offer just that little bit extra.
It will also be quieter, too. That's the benefit of these third-party GPUs, with their own coolers, and MSI's versions of Nvidia's graphics cards, especially these overclocked ones, have always been a great option for PC gamers.
And in terms of performance, well, the RTX 3080 GPU delivers outstanding gaming frame rates all the way up to 4K. It will even deliver ray-traced gaming levels that means turning on the fancy shiny lighting effects won't kill your performance as a punishment for enabling the pretties.
