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.