MSI RTX 3090 Gaming X Trio Review

Peter Donnell / 4 years ago

A Closer Look

Without a doubt, this is one of the best looking graphics cards out there. I love the design and well, there’s a LOT of it to love. It’s extremely big, with huge fans and just look how wide it is, standing quite a bit beyond the installation bracket at the back.

Of course, a big cooler is a good thing on an extremely powerful graphics card. There’s a huge heatsink on this card offering up a lot of surface area. So much so, that this card can be passively cooled below 55c. beyond that, and the fans will wake up and do their job. However, the card does have independent fan control, so it’ll only spin up the fans it really needs.

The card is long and wide, but also 2.5 slots thick, and you can see, it really does pack in quite a lot of fins on that two-section heatsink. It’s no surprise that the card is extremely heavy too. Even the PCB is extra thick and has 2oz of thickened copper to improve the durability and performance.

There’s a full-size backplate too, which has the main GPU chipset bracket exposed, allowing you to more easily remove the cooler if needed. There’s a bit of ventilation towards the rear of the card too. Branding is fairly minimal though, with GEFORCE RTX at one end and a small MSI dragon in the middle. The backplate is metal, obviously, and quite heavy. However, even the backplate has two large flat heat pipes running behind it! MSI are taking cooling very seriously here.

Got power? Because this card wants it all! Triple 8-pin headers can easily cope with the 370W requirement, but also provided added voltage stability by balancing the load too.

Need some RGB? It’s kept to a minimum this time, with just the side of the card offering up some customisation. The logo’s, as well as a small lightbar behind the backplate light up. Honestly, that’s about all the RGB I want in my card.