MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio Review

Name: MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio
Brand: MSI

W1zzard

on Dec 1st, 2020,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: MSI

(4 Comments) »

Introduction

The MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio is the company's top custom-design rendition of the new RTX 3060 Ti Ampere graphics processor by NVIDIA. The MSI card features a mammoth custom-design cooling solution originally designed for GPUs from a segment above, which lets it run the fans at whisper-quiet speeds. The Gaming X Trio brand from MSI also represents the best from the company in terms of aesthetics, with this card featuring a vast set of RGB LED embellishments, including one that runs along the top edge of the card, where it's most visible.

The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is designed by NVIDIA to offer maxed out gaming at 1440p resolution with RTX raytracing enabled. Real-time raytracing remains the final frontier of 3D graphics and is out of reach for consumer computing, but NVIDIA devised a way to combine traditional raster 3D graphics with certain real-time raytraced elements, such as reflections, lighting, shadows, and illumination. Even these few effects are heavily taxing on the GPU, and the previous RTX 20-series GPUs experience massive performance drops with RTX enabled. The Ampere architecture is designed to minimize the performance impact of RTX by significantly increasing the compute muscle, which means raster 3D performance is naturally up. NVIDIA claims that the RTX 3060 Ti is faster than the $700 RTX 2080 Super from the previous generation, which should mark a massive price-to-performance increase.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is based on the same 8 nm "GA104" Ampere silicon as the RTX 3070, though is heavily cut down. NVIDIA enabled 38 out of 48 streaming multiprocessors physically present on the GPU, which work out to 4,864 CUDA cores being enabled, along with 152 Tensor cores, 38 RT cores, 158 TMUs, and 80 ROPs. The memory sub-system is the same as on the RTX 3070, with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory running at 14 Gbps over a 256-bit wide memory interface, which works out to 448 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The 2nd generation RTX technology combines new "Ampere" CUDA cores with concurrent FP32+INT32 math performance, faster 2nd generation RT cores with fixed-function hardware for the new raytraced motion-blur effect; and 3rd generation Tensor core, which leverages sparsity to significantly improve AI inference performance.

As mentioned, the MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is the most premium custom-design RTX 3060 Ti offering by MSI. It offers a 1830 MHz rated boost clock, 80 MHz over the reference design 1665 MHz. The cooling solution is three slots thick and much longer than the PCB underneath, letting air from the third fan flow right through. MSI is pricing the Gaming X Trio at $470, a $70 premium over the $400 baseline price. In this review, we explore whether the price increase and factory overclock, along with this massive cooling solution, make up for the increased price.

GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Shader Units	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
RTX 2060	$300	1920	48	1365 MHz	1680 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RX 5700	$330	2304	64	1465 MHz	1625 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
GTX 1080	$330	2560	64	1607 MHz	1733 MHz	1251 MHz	GP104	7200M	8 GB, GDDR5X, 256-bit
RTX 2060 Super	$380	2176	64	1470 MHz	1650 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX Vega 64	$400	4096	64	1247 MHz	1546 MHz	953 MHz	Vega 10	12500M	8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
GTX 1080 Ti	$650	3584	88	1481 MHz	1582 MHz	1376 MHz	GP102	12000M	11 GB, GDDR5X, 352-bit
RX 5700 XT	$370	2560	64	1605 MHz	1755 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070	$340	2304	64	1410 MHz	1620 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070 Super	$450	2560	64	1605 MHz	1770 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Radeon VII	$680	3840	64	1802 MHz	N/A	1000 MHz	Vega 20	13230M	16 GB, HBM2, 4096-bit
RTX 2080	$600	2944	64	1515 MHz	1710 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Super	$690	3072	64	1650 MHz	1815 MHz	1940 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060 Ti	$400	4864	80	1410 MHz	1665 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
MSI RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio	$470	4864	80	1410 MHz	1830 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Ti	$1000	4352	88	1350 MHz	1545 MHz	1750 MHz	TU102	18600M	11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit
RTX 3070	$500	5888	96	1500 MHz	1725 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800	$580	3840	96	1815 MHz	2105 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	23000M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800 XT	$650	4608	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	23000M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3080	$700	8704	96	1440 MHz	1710 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	10 GB, GDDR6X, 320-bit

Packaging

The Card

For their RTX 3060 Ti, MSI reused the design of their GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio. The card is dominated by black with some gray highlights. The three fans are 95 mm in diameter. On the other side is a backplate.

Dimensions of the card are 32 x 14 cm, and it weighs 1451 g.

Installation requires three slots in your system.

Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and one HDMI 2.1. Interestingly, the USB-C port for VR headsets, which NVIDIA introduced on the Turing Founders Editions, has been removed—guess it didn't take off as planned. 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.

Unlike the Founders Edition, which uses the NVIDIA 12-pin power connector, MSI uses standard PCIe power plugs. The card uses two 8-pin power inputs, which are specified to provide up to 375 W in power.

The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti does not support SLI. Only the RTX 3090 has very limited SLI support.

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.

Near the top of the card, a metal bracket is attached the 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.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles or forum posts.