Packaging

The Card

We've seen the new MSI Gaming X Trio design on several recent releases from both AMD and NVIDIA. The bulky design language looks great on the card, black is the dominant color paired with various shades of gray. On the back, you'll find a plastic backplate.


Dimensions of the card are 32 x 14 cm, and it weighs 1480 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4 and one HDMI 2.1.

The DisplayPort 1.4a outputs support Display Stream Compression (DSC) 1.2a, which lets you connect 4K displays at 120 Hz and 8K displays at 60 Hz. Ampere can drive two 8K displays at 60 Hz with just one cable per display.

Ampere is the first GPU to support HDMI 2.1, which increases bandwidth to 48 Gbps to support higher resolutions, like 4K144 and 8K30, with a single cable. With DSC, this goes up to 4K240 and 8K120. NVIDIA's new NVENC/NVDEC video engine is optimized to handle video tasks with minimal CPU load. The highlight here is added support for AV1 decode. Just like on Turing, you may also decode MPEG-2, VC1, VP8, VP9, H.264, and H.265 natively, at up to 8K@12-bit.

The encoder is identical to Turing. It supports H.264, H.265, and lossless at up to 8K@10-bit.


The card has two 8-pin power inputs. This configuration is rated for up to 375 W of power draw.


The GeForce RTX 3060 does not support SLI. Only the RTX 3090 has very limited SLI support. Note the little silkscreen on the PCB, which is for a dual-BIOS switch—guess that could be for the RTX 3060 Suprim X.

Teardown

MSI uses six heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU surface. The main heatsink also provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry. This is the same heatsink design as on the RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio.


Near the top of the card, a metal bracket is attached to the PCB and IO shield, which improves torsion strength of the card to protect against sagging.


The backplate is made out of plastic and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.