Moore Threads S80 GPU Hardware Analysis and Gaming Benchmarks Reveal Massive Performance Failures and Driver Issues Despite Impressive High Memory Specifications
Although the market is dominated by 3 players, alternatives are not out of the question, as these alternatives come out from regional markets. Hardware evaluators, Dawid Does Tech Stuff, published a video where he bought the Moore Threads S80 for $430.94 on AliExpress. This card had an impressive 16 gigs of memory, twice of what an RTX 5050 will run you for 3x as much money, but it would seem impressive paper specs do not make a good gaming card.
Moore Threads was found by Nvidia's former global vice president of China, and they are looking for their shot at a high end gaming card with their new S80. This card has an all metal cooler with 3 fans and 4 copper heat pipes, but when opened up, you find that this board design is nothing like the boards from AMD or Nvidia, with its power delivery along the top of the board. This is a truly large chip compared to high end components from other companies, though with it being 12 nanometers it actually would make a somewhat understandable comparison to something like a 30 series Nvidia card, but sadly this card can't do anything of that caliber.
Unfortunately, this card has a weird power input on the front, requiring a included adapter that combines dual 8 pin power cables into a single 8 pin plug. There is no back slot exhaust on this card's cooling shroud and the shroud dumps all the hot air into the back of your case. Although it may seem like a high quality card to some simply by the construction of the cooler shroud, its unique form factor can only cause installation headaches.
The main thing holding the Moore Threads S80 back from its potential is its drivers. Finding the drivers was difficult and ended up leading to a special page on a Chinese website with no included language options in the setup. Along with this, these drivers refuse to uninstall cleanly; standard Display Driver Uninstaller pass failed to detect anything to remove and left driver conflicts when switching to an RTX 5050 on the same OS.
Because of its lack of driver support, that 16 gigabyte of memory is practically useless when playing modern titles. he used a computer with a high end Intel processor, 32 gigs of DDR 5, and a plethora of storage and tried playing some games like Forza 6, Stalker 2, or Doom Eternal(Vulkan) where many of these games simply refused to launch causing an instant error or engine crash, even when testing with the provided drivers on an Intel based OS.
Where the games didn't refuse to launch, they perform dismally. The Counter Strike 2 benchmark was so poor on the card that even with the resolution set to 1440p, the card performs worse than integrated Intel Graphics, as it performs like an 85 year old with asthma
with its massive frame rate drops and stutters. The 1% lows of the graphics card were so catastrophic that despite having a higher frame rate in average compared to the integrated graphics card, the game was still not playable due to all the visual inconsistencies and massive frame rate dips, this was all at 1440p In the games Cyberpunk 2077 and Borderlands 3, at 1080p on low settings, it could barely hit 12 frames per second and had flickering, strange colors, and weird rendering. Despite it performing terribly, the graphics card claimed 99% utilization and was drawing 160W of power. For every other game on the benchmark such as Gta V or Dota 2, it would struggle significantly to run, whilst the RTX 5050 would pull more than 10x the frame rates for significantly less power compared to the idling RTX 5050. This graphics card is only good as a collectible piece of hardware, not as an affordable gaming alternative.
