MSI Gaming X Trio RTX 3060 Graphics Card Review

How Much Does It Cost?

Of course, during this continued pandemic, post-Brexit world, the supply of these graphics cards is going to be limited. It will improve in time, but for now, there are less GPUs being manufactured due to complications in the component supply chain. To add to that, consumer demand is higher than ever, so when the stock does land, it gets snapped up. Be patient, and may luck be on your side when shopping for something closer to MSRP.

Unfortunately, that is the next issue, we know the MSRP of this card is closer to £300, but even before launch, I’m writing this knowing that the prices will be higher right out the gate. This card will be launching with a store price that matches the RTX 3070 at its launch…

If you have a decent 1000 or 2000 series Nvidia GPU, this might not be the cost vs performance upgrade you were looking for. However, if you’re building a new PC, or upgrading from something much older, then perhaps that pill won’t be so hard to swallow.

Overview

MSI has gone above and beyond with this graphics cards design. Actually, I think they may have gone too far with it, but that’s really subjective. There’s no issue with the performance, and we tested two RTX 3060’s today, this one and the Gigabyte RTX 3060, and they were both incredibly closely matched, which is both a good thing and a bad thing.

MSI two power connectors on this card vs the single on one the Gigabyte, but it doesn’t draw any more power, and it doesn’t seem to make the card any faster either. The only thing it would benefit is if you were overclocking the card, but that doesn’t really strike me as the goal of your typical RTX 3060 customer; it is the lowest model in the range, after all.

Performance

Make no mistake though, this is still a very impressive card. The chipset features fewer CUDA cores than the RTX 3060 Ti, but they’re also faster cores. Plus, with the addition of more VRAM, which the card benefits from at higher resolutions. It’s not taking down the flagship cards any time soon, but we were getting great performance at 1440p, and many games ran fantastic even at 4K. 84 FPS in Wolfenstein, 70FPS in Ghost Recon at 4K is impressive. More demanding games were lower, but still pretty playable, and DLSS and other Nvidia trickery can fill in the gaps nicely.

Build Quality

This is quite possibly the most over-engineered RTX 3060 we’ll see. The cooler is complete overkill. It’s the same cooler we’ve seen equipped on the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 cards, and if it can cool those monsters, it can make light work of this cut-down chipset. The GPU never went above 59c, which is practically an ice cube as far as GPU chipsets go. That’s 5c cooler than the Gigabyte card. That also means lower noise, with acoustics maxing out at 38.9 dBa. Honestly, you could dial back the fans until the card hits 65c and reap the huge benefit of a nearly silent gaming card and still not worry about thermal throttling.

Should I Buy One?

MSI has put a lot of expensive hardware on this card. While a lot of it hasn’t made it a faster card, it’s one of the best looking graphics cards, and it’s exquisitely engineered too. It’s got so many features to provide more stable voltages, lower temperatures, lower noise levels and well, that’s exactly what it does. It’s everything a gamer could want, really, but it really down to you if you’re willing to pay extra for such things.