Specs and pricing of MSI’s latest RTX 5080 Expert graphics card have cropped up online. Discovered by Алексей on X, the new card takes a radical departure from traditional RTX 5080 aftermarket GPUs, sporting a dual-fan blower design inspired by the RTX 40 series Founders Edition coolers. MSI’s U.S. store lists the RTX 5080 Expert at $1,399.99.
The RTX 5080 Expert represents MSI’s second iteration of its latest Expert-branded graphics cards. The new GPU features a cooler design that utilizes two fans in a push-pull configuration. One fan sits on the bottom left as an intake, ejecting air out where the rear I/O is located, while the other fan sits on the top right of the card, where the backplate is, and exhausts air out of the GPU, intaking air from a perforated vent on the other side of the shroud.
The two fans channel air through an “advanced” vapor chamber cooler inside, featuring square-shaped heatpipes. The entire graphics card is built around an aluminum die-cast, which improves its structural integrity.
The RTX 5080 Expert’s unique cooling approach features a blower-style aesthetic, with a completely enclosed shroud that conceals all internal components, except for the 16-pin power connector.
msi GeForce RTX™ 5080 16G EXPERT OC pic.twitter.com/zpA6bJVkPwAugust 2, 2025
The RTX 5080 Expert weighs 4.18 lbs and measures 12.56″ x 5.91″ x 2.36″. The OC variant features a boost clock of up to 2,715 MHz and draws 360 watts of power, requiring an 850W power supply or greater (according to MSI). MSI is also using the same traditional video outputs as on most (if not all) other RTX 5080 GPUs, featuring three DisplayPort 2.1b connectors and a single HDMI 2.1b port on the back.
Not much has changed with the RTX 5080 Expert compared to its RTX 4080 Super predecessor. Both have virtually identical cooling solutions, with the only main difference being some minor aesthetic changes on the RTX 5080 variant. The RTX 5080 Expert features a black-painted sticker on each fan hub with silver MSI lettering in the center, as well as a black backplate. The RTX 4080 Super Expert featured the same fan hub stickers, but with the colors inverted, and a backplate that matched the entire shroud’s color.
Technically, the RTX 4080 Super is thicker and requires the area of three PCIe brackets to fit in a case. However, the RTX 5080 variant is only 1mm thinner and requires only the area of two PCIe brackets, which improves case compatibility somewhat.
MSI first introduced the Expert series with Nvidia’s previous-generation RTX 4080 Super. The Expert series is one of the only aftermarket cooling solutions that takes direct inspiration from Nvidia’s RTX 30 series and RTX 40 series Founders Edition cooler designs, which also incorporate the same push-pull design language.
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