DUAL MSI GTX 1080 GAMING X

DREAM MACHINE IS ABOUT MORE than gaming, though it will handle any game you throw at it. Market forces also threw us a curve ball, with Nvidia recommending against (and not actively supporting) anything more than two GPUs for SLI. Obviously, we would have liked to use two of Nvidia’s new Pascal-based Titan X cards, but we couldn’t quite justify it—and getting two in was proving tricky—so we turned to the GTX 1080. But which one should we use?

The fastest factory overclocked cards are often specially binned, with chips that run better, with boosted voltages, and a few other useful tweaks. We selected the MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X, which comes with a healthy factory OC—then we pushed it even further, going from the factory 1,708MHz core to an overall clock of 2,126MHz. We also redlined the memory, moving the needle from 10Gb/s to a blistering 11Gb/s.

Despite going from four-way GTX Titan X (Maxwell) to two-way GTX 1080, this year’s Dream Machine delivers far better gaming performance than last year’s. And even overclocked, our GTX 1080 cards use far less power than the previous gen Titan X.