Chinese MTT S80 Gaming Graphics Card Review Shows Slower Than GT 1030 Performance At Over 200W

The first reviews of the Chinese MTT S80 graphics cards are beginning to show up online and it loses to a GT 1030 while consuming way more power.

The MTT S80 is a gaming graphics card developed by Chinese manufacturer, Moores Threads. The company has mostly been developing hardware for the server and AI segment with the S80 being its first foray into the consumer gaming segment. A few days ago, we reported on some gaming performance numbers of the card and now we have a full-on review along with a disassembly of the entire unit posted online by 뻘짓연구소 over at YouTube.

The Moore Threads MTT S80 is purely focused on gamers. It features 4096 MUSA streaming cores and runs at 1.8 GHz, providing users with 14.4 TFLOPs of compute performance. While gaming is its focus, the graphics card can also be used for 3D rendering and AI processing. The graphics card comes with a  PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, offering up to 128 GB/s of bandwidth. The card is also equipped with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. As for the display outputs, the graphics card features 3 DisplayPort 1.4a and a single HDMI 2.1 port.

The Moore Threads MTT S80 reference design comes in a triple-fan and dual-slot design which features four display outputs that include three DP 1.4a and a single HDMI 2.1 output. The card comes with a single 8-pin power connector but this is no standard 8-pin connector. The MTT S80 uses an EPS 12V 8pin connector which is the same as the one used by CPUs and can deliver up to 300 Watts of power. There's an adapter that ships with the card and requires two standard PCIe 8-pin plugs to boot.

The design of the card is a mix of both high-end and standard components. The triple-fan array is housed in a plastic shroud with a metal frame on top of it. The heatsink uses two aluminum blocks which are interconnected via four heat pipes. The copper base sits directly over the GPU & the die measures around 400mm2 (approximately) as BullsLab has pointed out. The VRM layout is quite interesting with the 6-phase VRM scattered on the edge of the PCB rather than in the middle. The GPU itself is surrounded by a total of 8 DRAM modules each of which houses 16Gb materials for 2 GB (each).

Now performance benchmarks were also published by the reviewer and also a different and well-known Chinese outlet on YouTube, BullsLab Benchmarks, which shows that the card consumes up to 252W of power and still loses to a GT 1030 which peaks out at 30W. The card did run cool at 44C temps but that's the only good thing about it so far. There were also instances where the card did not even run some games due to API and software compatibility issues. Given all these issues, the MTT S80 graphics card may not be that good of a side option even for the Chinese market.

There also seems to be massive underutilization going on with the MTT S80 GPU which needs to be addressed. The card also has a retail price of around $300 US in the Chinese domestic market so it seems unlikely that it will sell that well considering the GT 1030 consumes lower power and can be found for lower than $100 US in the same region in abundance.