MSI has been rumored to have at least eight different models of the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card, and two of them, the RTX 4070 Gaming X Trio and RTX 4070 Ventus 3X, have now leaked online, ahead of the launch scheduled for next week. What makes it interesting is that this will be the first RTX 40 series graphics card that will be able to come without the 16-pin 12VHPWR connector.

MSI's Gaming X Trio, as the more premium edition, will be a 2.5-slot design with triple-fan cooler, have more RGB effects, and will feature the 16-pin 12VHPWR connector. The MSI RTX 4070 Ventus 3X as a more budget-oriented SKU, will have a triple-fan cooling system but only takes two slots, and it needs a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. While both are factory-overclocked models, it is obvious that the MSI RTX 4070 Gaming X Trio will have a higher overclocking potential.

Eiswolf 2 AiO - now also for custom designs of RTX 4080/4090 and RX 7900XT/XTX GPUs! Alphacool presents additional innovative solutions for cooling Nvidia's Geforce RTX 4080 and 4090 and AMD's RX 7900XT/XTX graphics cards.

The enormous waste heat of the new graphics card generation is excellently dissipated with these coolers. The very good water flow and the large cooling surface are due to the particularly filigree fin structure. The jet plate with revised inflow engine also distributes the water perfectly on the cooling fins. The complete chrome plating of the cooler not only provides resistant protection against acids, scratches and damage, but also achieves a beautiful homogeneity and remarkable shine. The Aurora design of the cooler is kept visually calm and simple. This is evident not only in the cooler's design, but also in the wonderfully even lighting achieved via digitally addressable RGB LEDs.

MSI Radeon RX 7900 XTX Gaming Trio Classic, the company's first Radeon 7000 series RDNA3 graphics card, is finally listed online. American retailer Newegg put it up for sale at $1,100, a $100 premium over the $1000 AMD baseline price for the RX 7900 XTX. This is a "sold and shipped by Newegg" listing. MSI showed this card off last month, at the 2023 International CES. It pairs a custom-design PCB with a previous-generation Tri Frozr 2.0 cooling solution—the same one it used with its RX 6950 XT Gaming series. The PCB, however, is an MSI in-house design, with a meaty VRM that draws power from three 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and should hence feature a higher power-limit than the reference-design board, which has been known to scoop out a far greater overclocking headroom on other cards with a similar power setup (such as the ASUS TUF Gaming RX 7900 XTX).

The MSI RX 7900 XTX Gaming Trio Classic comes with clock speeds of 2.30 GHz game, and 2.50 GHz boost, which surprisingly are AMD's reference clocks. Perhaps MSI is saving factory-overclocks for the RX 7900 XTX Gaming X Trio Classic, which it will price even higher. Maxing out the 5 nm "Navi 31" GPU, the RX 7900 XTX offers 6,144 stream processors across 96 RDNA3 compute units, with 96 Ray Accelerators, 384 TMUs, 192 ROPs, and a 384-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, running 24 GB of memory at 20 Gbps (960 GB/s memory bandwidth).

MSI has, for the first time, released white variants of its Gaming X Trio line of graphics cards, from the company's most recognizable high-end graphics card sub-brand. This new original design retains the black PCB, but combines it with a variant of the Tri Frozr 3 cooler that replaces matte+gloss black for a 2-tone white+gray scheme, with some matte silver bits. The TorX 5 fan impellers are white, too, but the underlying heatsink remains in its original anodized-aluminium form. There's just enough work put into the design so the card doesn't end up looking like a SUPRIM X product. The factory-overclock on these cards will be similar to their conventional cousins. We got confirmation that MSI is giving the Gaming X White treatment to at least two graphics card SKUs, the GeForce RTX 4080, and the RTX 4070 Ti.

The most expensive custom-design NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 will be priced at $1,550, putting it just $50 short of the $1,600 baseline MSRP of the much faster RTX 4090, according to a pricing leak of custom-design cards on popular PC components retailer MicroCenter. The most interesting takeaway from this leak is that there will actually be RTX 4080 cards at the NVIDIA-set baseline MSRP of $1,200. These include the GIGABYTE Eagle, ZOTAC Trinity, ASUS TUF Gaming, and PNY XLR8 Verto. NVIDIA appears to be telling its partners to sell at least one custom-design RTX 4080 SKU at the baseline price.

Most factory-overclocked custom-design RTX 4080 SKUs are within $125 of the $1,200 baseline, with the GIGABYTE Eagle OC priced at $1,240, GIGABYTE Gaming OC at $1,280, MSI Ventus 3X OC at $1,280, and the premium MSI Gaming X Trio at $1,325. The top-tier custom-design cards start here, with the GIGABYTE AORUS Master priced at $1,350, the MSI SUPRIM X (air-cooled) at $1,400, the ZOTAC AMP Extreme AIRO at $1,400, ASUS TUF Gaming OC at $1,500; and the ASUS ROG Strix OC at $1,550, which is just $50 short of the cheapest RTX 4090 (baseline-spec). Will anyone pick the ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4080 O16G over the cheapest RTX 4090 (assuming availability of both)? That's a social experiment to watch out for.

NVIDIA GeForce GPUs feature hotspot temperature measurement akin to AMD Radeon ones, according to an investigative report by Igor's Lab. A beta version of HWInfo already supports hotspot measurement. As its name suggests, the hotspot is the hottest spot on the GPU, measured from a network of thermal sensors across the GPU die, unlike conventional "GPU Temperature" sensors, which reads off a single physical location of the GPU die. AMD refers to this static sensor as "Edge temperature." In some cases, the reported temperature of this sensor could differ from the hotspot by as much as 20°C, which underscores the importance of hotspot. The sensor with the highest temperature measurement becomes the hotspot.

GPU manufacturers rarely disclose the physical locations of on-die thermal sensors, but during the AMD Radeon VII, we got a rare glimpse at this, in a company slide, with the sensors being located near components that can get the hottest, such as the compute units (pictured below). Igor's Lab put out measurements of the deviation between the hotspot and "GPU temperature" sensors on a GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition card. There's a much narrower deviation between the two (between 11-14°C), and than the one between hotspot and Edge temperature on an MSI Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming X Trio (which posts a 12-20°C difference).

MSI is proud to officially announce the Radeon RX 6900 XT GAMING X TRIO graphics card, powered by the groundbreaking AMD RDNA2 gaming architecture. AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards provide new levels of performance, incredible visual fidelity and advanced features to power amazing 4K gaming experiences.

The AMD RDNA2 gaming architecture at the core of the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Series is designed to deliver the optimal combination of performance and efficiency. It features a breakthrough high-speed design and enhanced power efficiency, designed to deliver higher performance with lower power consumption, and a new cache hierarchy designed to minimize data movement, latency and power usage. In addition, support for DirectX 12 Ultimate provides gamers with a powerful blend of raytracing, compute and rasterized effects to elevate games to a new level of realism.

Alphacool presents the Eisblock Aurora Acryl GPX-A block for the Radeon MSI RX 6800/6800 XT Gaming X Trio and the Radeon Sapphire RX 6800XT Nitro+ graphics cards. The blocks offer outstanding cooling performance thanks to the full cover design. The new backplate, which is included with the coolers, also contributes to this. This stabilizes the graphics card and ensures an even contact pressure of the cooler. The cold plates are made of solid nickel-plated copper. The coolers cover all relevant components such as voltage converters and the graphics memory.

MSI in its regular MSI Insider stream unveiled its premium custom-design graphics card based on the Radeon RX 6800 XT, the RX 6800 XT Gaming X Trio. This card features the latest generation Tri Frozr 2 board design that the company introduced with its NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30-series custom-design graphics cards. The Radeon logo sits next to an illuminated MSI Gaming logo along the top of the card. Next to them are two 8-pin PCIe power inputs. The cooling solution appears to be of the same size as the one found on the GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio. We expect this card to MSI's most premium RX 6800 XT offering. AMD in its launch event for the RX 6000 series claimed that the RX 6800 XT offers performance competitive with the RTX 3080.

Recently, it has been brought to light that a particular seller on Ebay was selling price-hiked MSI RTX 30-series graphics cards - such as the RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio - well over MSRP ($1,359 for an RTX 3080, compared to NVIDIA's $699 and MSI's $799). A more attentive look at the seller, identified as Starlit Partner, reveals that they carried only MSI-manufactured SKUs for NVIDIA's RTX 30-series, and was selling them, in most cases, as sealed and brand new. Now, scalping of NVIDIA's latest graphics card series has been thoroughly covered here on TechPowerUp; however, suspicions of ties between Starlit Partner and MSI itself, and the suggestion that this was a coordinated move in order to sell RTX 30-series inventory at marked-up pricing, deserves a longer appraisal.

As soon as the suspicion was posted in the Internet, some users donned their detective cloaks and went digging for more information, and confirmed the ties to MSI. However, MSI has already issued a statement on the issue, clarifying the scenario we were faced with. Indeed, MSI has ties to Starlit Partner, as they themselves acknowledge - the later is an individual sales subsidiary working under MSI. However, MSI further explains in the statement that Starlit Partner is tasked with the sale of refurbished items and excess inventory - and that they should never have had access to NVIDIA's RTX-30 series graphics cards in the first place. MSI launched an investigation that confirmed an error in inventory allocation allowed Starlit Partner to access inventory they shouldn't have had access to (without clarifying the error).

EK, premium liquid cooling gear manufacturer based in Europe, is launching a new, addressable D-RGB version of EK-Vector Trio high-performance water blocks specially designed for MSI Gaming X Trio GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards. The block also features a D-RGB lit aesthetic cover over the block Terminal which is designed to showcase the graphics card model via addressable LEDs, visible from the side.

The EK-Quantum Vector Trio RTX D-RGB water blocks are specially designed for multiple MSI Trio GeForce RTX Turing based graphics cards. These water blocks use the signature EK single slot slim look and cover the entire PCB length. This sophisticated cooling solution will transform your powerful MSI graphics card into a minimalistic, elegant piece of hardware with accented D-RGB (addressable) LED lighting. The block also features a unique aesthetic cover over the block Terminal which is designed to showcase the graphics card model via addressable LEDs, visible from the side.

EK Water Blocks, the Slovenia-based premium computer liquid cooling gear manufacturer, is releasing EK-FC Trio RTX 2080 Ti Classic RGB water block that is compatible with the MSI RTX 2080 Ti Gaming X Trio graphics cards. This kind of efficient cooling will allow your high-end graphics card to reach higher boost clocks, thus providing more performance during gaming or other GPU intense tasks.

This water block directly cools the GPU, 11 GB of GDDR6 memory, and VRM (voltage regulation module) as cooling liquid is channeled directly over these critical areas. EK-FC Trio RTX 2080 Ti Classic RGB water block features a central inlet split-flow cooling engine design for best possible cooling performance, which also works flawlessly with reversed water flow without adversely affecting the cooling performance. This kind of efficient cooling will allow your high-end graphics card to reach higher boost clocks, thus providing more performance during gaming or other GPU intense tasks. Moreover, such design offers great hydraulic performance allowing this product to be used in liquid cooling systems using weaker water pumps.

MSI is working on its next-generation flagship graphics card, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Lightning Z (going by previous naming conventions for the Lightning). The card will be positioned above its current Gaming X Trio, as well as the liquid-cooled SeaHawk series, and it's possible there could be a sub-variant with factory-fitted full-coverage water-block. As with previous generation cards that bear the name, the card could have the highest factory overclock in MSI's product stack, the strongest VRM setup that's voltmod-friendly, and a gargantuan cooling solution for its air-cooled sub-variant. There's no word on when MSI could roll the beast out. MSI teased the card with a final slide in one of its media events in China, which depicts lightning bolts captioned "Coming Soon."

MSI is proud to announce its latest high-end graphics card, the new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GAMING X TRIO. This new card features three fans and a beautiful Mystic Light RGB implementation with detailed controls. Boasting an improved thermal design with Military Class certified components, it's bound to enhance your high-end gaming experience.

MSI's Mystic Light enables you to customize the RGB effects of your hardware to give your system a different look whenever you feel like it. Using the MSI Mystic Light software, you can control three zones of LED individually on the shroud and backplate. Furthermore, you can synchronize colors and effects of your graphics card, motherboard, case-fans and peripherals to enhance the gaming atmosphere surrounding you.

While we're still waiting to see AMD's Vega graphics cards undergo a proper custom treatment from the company's AIB partners (MSI included), Micro-Star International has announced at the Tokyo Game Show that they'll be launching yet another version of NVIDIA's GTX 1080 Ti graphics card. This new design revision picks up the triple fan design that has been the staple of MSI's Lightning series of graphics cards, and applies it to the Gaming X brand. The MSI GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X Trio will thus feature 3x of the company's Torx 2.0 fans. The card features a 2.5-slot design that exhausts the hot air to the inside of your case (a minor inconvenience, since MSI's graphics cooling designs are generally considered some of the best out there), and features MSI's Mystic Light RGB tech.