As I gradually whittle my way through the stack of GTX 1080's I have in front of me, something is becoming increasingly obvious: for all their differences in branding, NVIDIA's board partners have precisions little differentiating their GPU designs from one another. Everything from overclocking headroom to cooling performance to even out-of-box clock speeds seems to have quickly reached a plateau. Also, like underglow was all the rage with import car tuners during the Fast & Furious heydays, LEDs are everywhere now and no, they don't add horsepower.

MSI has realized that even with such powerful graphics cards within NVIDIA's stable, their little corner of the market runs the very real risk of stagnation. What could possibly set their wares apart from the G1's, Superclockeds, AMPs and STRIXes of this world? As it stood last time around, not all that much and MSI's market share took a small dip.