Introduction

Today, we bring you our review of the MSI GeForce RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio, the company's premium implementation of the newly launched RTX 3070 "Ampere" performance-segment GPU. MSI has always managed to surprise us with the power, noise, and factory-OC optimization of its Gaming X and Gaming Z lines of premium custom-design graphics cards, and we have the same expectations form this one. Right off the bat we see that the card looks almost identical to the MSI RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio, which is a huge card. This means all that cooling muscle is being used to tame a GPU that's much smaller and with 100 W less typical board power than the RTX 3080, which bodes well for the card's noise and thermals on paper, right away.

The GeForce RTX 3070 is an important product for NVIDIA as it offers more than double the performance per dollar than the RTX 2080 Ti, and NVIDIA claims the RTX 3070 even beats it. This would mean the RTX 3070 is able to do the same things as the RTX 2080 Ti—maxed out gaming at 1440p with RTX-on, and 4K UHD gaming with reasonably high settings, including mid-tier settings of RTX. This would bring 4K UHD gaming to an even wider audience while also delivering high refresh-rate gaming to the 1440p and 1080p e-sports segments. At the heart of the RTX 3070 is the new 8 nm "GA104" silicon, which is much smaller than the "GA102" that powers the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. The RTX 3070 nearly maxes out the "GA104." NVIDIA cut costs where it could by giving this card the same 8 GB of 14 Gbps, 256-bit GDDR6 memory as the RTX 2070. For the full details on RTX 3070 technology and architecture, refer to our RTX 3070 Founders Edition article.



Switching gears back to our MSI RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio review sample, we see that the card uses the same awesome Tri Frozr 2 cooling solution as the RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio series. This cooler features a large aluminium fin-stack heatsink to which heat is drawn from six copper heat-pipes that are bunched up in the middle to form the GPU contact base—a technology MSI calls Core Pipe. The heatsink is ventilated by three identically sized TorX 2 fans featuring webbed impellers to direct all their airflow axially. The biggest perk of picking up this premium RTX 3070 is the RGB bedazzlement you get with the card, with a large silicon diffuser along the top edge of the card that's most visible when viewed from your case's window; and RGB elements along the top of the card near the fans. Under the hood is a custom PCB optimized for high power limits, which draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors for sufficient physical headroom to raise power. With factory-overclocked speeds of 1830 MHz (compared to 1725 MHz reference), this card has the highest clock speeds on paper. But many more factors go into putting those clock speeds to use. In this review, we take the MSI GeForce RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio for a spin to tell you if it's worth paying a $60 premium over the $500 baseline pricing for the RTX 3070.