Mystical Monster

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS

LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY

THE CONCEPT

COME ON NOW, you knew it was coming. You can’t launch a major new GPU architecture and a swathe of graphics cards and expect us here at Maximum PC to not go out and put together a ridiculously over-the-top, super-powerful, super-expensive machine. It’s in our nature. So that is exactly what we’re doing here today.

However, if I’m honest, it being this colorful is a happy accident—depending on your point of view anyway. It’s certainly not something we set out to achieve, but it’s part and parcel of working with the brands we do—more on that later.

So what’s the ambition? Well simply put, to see how well MSI’s GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio can perform in an actual PCIe 4.0 rig, with a fairly solid base spec. We’ve got a full in-depth deep dive into Ampere’s architecture on page 38, and a review of the Founder’s Edition card on page 68, but this is our first look at an aftermarket card, and that raises a lot of questions. There’s been some furore surrounding capacitors on these cards, especially the aftermarket variants, as they seem to be running at the absolute limit (built to Nvidia’s specs), and any attempt to overclock leads to blue screens and crashes. Secondly, these things are seriously big, and as the cards are known to draw