MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC review: Strong performance, good value

The second GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card to arrive in our lab is the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 16G Vanguard SOC Launch Edition. Just like the new ROG Astral series, which was introduced as the brand’s top-tier line of graphics card at CES 2025, the Vanguard is MSI’s latest addition to its own graphics card line-up alongside the existing Suprim and Gaming Trio stacks at the same event. But unlike the flagship Astral, the Vanguard bridges the gap between the high-end Suprim and mainline Gaming Trio series.

The Vanguard picks a bit of design elements here and there from both series, such as the Suprim’s brush-aluminium backplate and the Gaming Trio’s sporty carbon fibre surfaces and RGB lighting diffusers. But it’s under the cooler shroud where it inherits many new cooling features that MSI introduced with this generation’s Suprim series that are combined into what the company called the Hyper Frozr thermal design.

The new design is an amalgamation of three “Stormforce” fans, an advanced vapor chamber and core pipes. Each fan comes with seven claw-textured blades that MSI says are designed to enhance air pressure to aid better in cooling. These fans are also built with double ball bearings that operate smoother and quieter. MSI has also made refinements. To further improve airflow stability, a fan cowl extends beyond the fan enclosure to lengthen the air passageway. Bulging notches under the cowl then help to reduce recirculation and focus airflow. Finally, a new vapor chamber covers the GPU and VRAM, transferring heat to the heat pipes.

These pipes have been precision-crafted to make maximum use of the available space. This means a squared-shaped contact area that make full contact with the vapor chamber to spread heat along the full length of the heatsink more efficiently.

The heatsink itself employs various fin designs to disrupt unwanted airflow harmonics and reduce noise. The filled fins allow more space for additional heatsink fins, while what MSI calls wave-curved 4.0 fins increase efficiency by adjusting the size of the wave edges under the fan motor and other areas where there is less airflow. Air antegrade fins 2.0 feature a V-shaped cutout, located at the airflow passthrough to improve flow efficiency. It does this by optimising the inclination angle and increasing the wave notch to shape air resistance toward the centre, pushing out warm air more quickly in a fashion similar to a nozzle.

There is passive cooling at work too in the form of the reinforced metal backplate. Thermal pads sit beneath the backplate for improved heat transfer, while ventilation cutouts reduce trapped heat.

Visually, the card looks uncannily like its Suprim brethren but with a bit more RGB bling that you’d come to expect from a Gaming Trio card. The Vanguard, then, is really the MSI graphics card you’d get by taking out the best of what we like from the Suprim and Gaming Trio cards and combining them.

Gaming performance

To benchmark the Vanguard RTX 5080 card, I used the same list of games used to test the RTX 5080 Founders Edition (FE) and ROG Astral GeForce RTX 4080 16GB OC Edition and compare it with these cards. I’ve also switched the card BIOS to “Gaming” mode, ensuring the card’s fastest settings are used.

We are also using the updated same test rig that was used to benchmark the GeForce RTX 5090 FE and comes with the following specifications:

• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
• ROG Maximus Z890 Hero
• Samsung 990 Pro 1TB SSD
• Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5
• Windows 11 Home 64-bit
• ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG32UCDM 4K Gaming Monitor

For our benchmarks, we want to focus on the 4K performance numbers. For gaming at lower resolutions, you'd really want to wait and get the RTX 5070 Ti / 5070 instead but I've included results from 1080p and 1440p benchmarks below anyway. I’m also only benchmarking the raw power of the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC card without DLSS switched on – since we already know the benefits with DLSS turned on, and any differences in framerates for supported games between the same class of GPU cards is going to be extremely negligible. That said, I will placing a heavy emphasis on factors like power draw and thermal performance.

That the ROG Astral card consistently beat the Vanguard RTX 5080 in our gaming benchmarks is not a surprise. In fact, you could even say it had to, considering it has a slightly higher boosted clock speed and it's a eye-searing $600 more expensive for the same GPU. But we are now in an age where unless you're doing some serious overclocking (or water-cooling), the difference in overall frame rates performance are very marginal at best, even at 4K. A difference in 1fps between the ROG and MSI cards in Cyberpunk is not going to make the game any better or worse on either card, frankly.

Cooling performance is the real differentiator when comparing custom cards from AIB partners. With a higher boost clock right out of the box, it’s no surprise that these cards’ GPU chips draw more power than NVIDIA's reference Founders Edition card. Between the NVIDIA and MSI cards, I'm really impressed by how much cooler the Vanguard card runs compared to the RTX 5080 Founders Edition in our 3DMark Speed Way stress test, considering that the Vanguard runs with a much higher boosted clock. A difference of 7-degree Celsius is a great showcase of thermal performance, and I think MSI's Hyper Frozr thermal design is working out really well here.

Final thoughts

MSI has a great card on its hands with the GeForce RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC, and I think saying $2,095 is "cheap" considering the prices of all other RTX 5080 cards proves just how mad a world we live in now. But this is the new normal for high-end gaming, I supposed.

It would have been easy to recommend the Vanguard just on performance to value alone, but the pricing of MSI’s Suprim and Gaming Trio RTX 5080 cards adds a bit of complexity to the equation for this card, with the former retailing at $2,149 and the latter at $1,999. While the Vanguard is certainly worth the extra $96 for its more robust cooling system and better looks (you even get extra goodies with the Vanguard Launch Edition), the same logic applies to the additional $54 for the flagship Suprim. When you’re already investing so much in a high-performance graphics card, the extra $54 for the top-tier option becomes an easy decision. MSI certainly could do a better pricing strategy for all three cards.

If you're already tied to a MSI PC components ecosystem, then the Vanguard is a no-brainer – it runs games at 4K as well as any RTX 5080 GPU should but more importantly, it's got a fantastic thermal efficiency too. That $54 discussion will come down to whether you prefer the looks of the more luxurious-looking Suprim or the gamer-centric Vanguard and its better RGB lights.

The MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Vanguard SOC is available from Amazon and Lazada.

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