With two of the three main areas knocked out of the park… we come to the other main claim to fame that makes an RTX 5080 Expert OC different from nearly all the competition: the cooling solution. Yes, others have done ‘push-pull’ and ‘flow through’ cooling before. The only one that combines both that is worth a darn is found on the Founder’s Edition models. Even then, it is not perfect. A cynical person would say that Big Green was more worried about price than performance and that ‘perfection’ would have cost more than they were willing to spend. We think that is being overly pessimistic and a touch… uncharitable. So what we will say is that NVIDIA prioritized aesthetics over sheer performance. Either way, the F.E. models run hotter than more classically designed ‘down draft + flow through’ board partner models. Especially when said model comes with three fans instead of just two.
This is where MSI’s design team enters the chat… and why they are fashionably late to the party. In simplistic terms, MSI took the time to analyze what makes the F.E. cooler… well… suck at its job so badly, and then they spent the time and effort to fix its ‘quirks’. The result of all this time, money, and manpower is the FLOW FROZR 2 custom cooling solution. A solution that takes all the good parts of Team Green’s design and then makes them work in the real world. Not just in CAD/CAM world.
Bluntly stated, this is a ‘2 fan’ model that easily outperforms many 3-fan options. It is the reason that an RTX 5080 is now available that is under 32cm in length and yet can compete ‘neck and neck’ with darn near any (non-water cooled) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 one cares to mention in real-world performance. Be it in overall noise (rather low) or core temps (also rather low) or core frequencies (high!), this Expert OC lives up to its name because of the FLOW FROZR 2 design. So much so, we hope they make a … “Flow FROZR 3” that uses 3 fans and 3 heatsinks instead of the 2+2 of the Flow Frozr 2.
So how does it do what it does? First, it does all it does because of the change in philosophy driving the design. Yes, MSI did not let their team go totally wild on the build cost. They just allowed them a lot more freedom than most. Take the two fans for example… an area where NVIDIA’s F.E. team goes mostly right. By opting for not 90, not 100, not even 110mm fans, but big boi 115mm fans, the RTX 5080 Expert OC has to have a relatively monstrous cooling array that is at least 15% larger in both the X and Y axis than most ‘3 fan’ models get.
To be precise, the front cooling array is 127.5mm by 148mm by an impressive chunky 31.2mm. Giving a surface area potential of 18,870mm2 / 588,744mm3.
The back cooling array may be mostly for secondary cooling, but at 129mm x 124.25 and a reasonably thick ~26.75mm… it too is no slouch.
Especially when Flow FROZR 2 is built upon six 8mm heatpipes…
Plus a secondary 6mm heatpipe….
That is paired not with a solid copper base but a premium vapor expansion chamber that brings new meaning to the phrase ‘efficient heat transfer’.
