MSI Expert Series to Debut With Overclocked RTX 4080 Super

At CES this year, Nvidia announced the RTX 40-series Super GPUs. This resulted in all of Nvidia's partners unveiling their versions of the cards to show off their latest designs, which looked almost exactly like the previous ones. The only standout was MSI, which announced an all-new Expert series. This design trades RGB and standard dual-or-triple inline fans for an understated, modern look. Now it's been revealed the Expert series will debut with the upcoming RTX 4080 Super cards.

Interest in MSI's Expert cards has been high since the official reveal, as it's the first design by an Nvidia partner that mimics the company's stylish Founders Edition GPUs. Like Nvidia's design, the Expert GPUs feature no RGB lighting (at least that we can see) and a push-pull fan design with each fan located on opposite ends of the card. Though Nvidia's cards are encased in a plastic shroud, MSI's version uses aluminum, so it should be extremely rigid. Sadly, it appears the only color option is the champagne color seen above, though this is a 3D render from Guru3D, so it's possible a black version could also appear at some point.

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The full specs for the MSI RTX 4080 Super Expert have been posted to Twitter, and as expected, the GPU is overclocked. However, according to Videocardz, it's only 60MHz higher than the reference card, so in the real world, both GPUs will likely have similar clocks when gaming. That boost clock is available in Silent and Gaming modes, as the card has a dual BIOS. Users can also juice the card an extra 15MHz if they install MSI's software, which seems like a lot of work for negligible benefit.

Nvidia will officially launch the RTX 4080 Super cards next Wednesday, so look for benchmarks on Tuesday. It remains to be seen how easy it will be to acquire an Expert card, as they might be a limited edition GPU. We say that because MSI doesn't even have it listed on its 4080 Super page. That makes us think it might be rare and priced much higher than the $999 MSRP. That could seriously dampen its appeal since performance will likely resemble the more affordable Founders Edition card, not to mention MSI's own "vanilla" RTX 4080 Super GPUs.