MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Gaming X Trio Review

on Feb 25th, 2021,

Manufacturer: MSI

Introduction

NVIDIA today launched its GeForce RTX 3060 "Ampere" graphics card, and the new MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Gaming X Trio is the company's premium interpretation of the new midrange offering. Historically, NVIDIA made the bulk of its sales to gamers of a new graphics architecture from its xx60 middle-of-the-market series, starting all the way back with the 9600 GT, which NVIDIA refers to as the "sweetspot." Cards from this segment are fast enough to let you max out a game at mainstream resolutions, or game at higher resolutions with reduced settings.

The new GeForce RTX 3060 retains the "sweetspot" entry price of $329, or roughly that of the Xbox Series S. It debuts the new 8 nm "GA106" silicon on the desktop platform and allows NVIDIA's custom board partners enormous headroom to either beef up the chip, as is the case with this MSI Gaming X Trio card, or keep costs low to come up with simple designs that skirt the baseline price. It is also designed to offer a significant performance uplift from the GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB "Pascal," another very popular card from the NVIDIA stable. The card is designed to offer 1440p gaming with fairly high details, or 1080p gaming with maxed out raytracing. You could also leverage DLSS 2.0 to crank up the display resolution.

The new GeForce Ampere architecture marks the 2nd generation of RTX Technology, which combines new Ampere CUDA cores with concurrent FP32+INT32 math performance, 2nd generation RT cores which double the intersection performance over the previous generation, hardware for raytraced motion-blur effects, and 3rd generation Tensor cores that leverage the sparsity phenomenon in neural nets to increase AI inference performance significantly.

The GeForce RTX 3060 comes with 3,584 Ampere CUDA cores, 112 3rd generation Tensor cores, 28 Ampere RT cores, 112 TMUs, and 48 ROPs. NVIDIA sweetens the deal by doubling the memory amount over the RTX 2060 to 12 GB. The memory bus width and memory type are unchanged—192-bit GDDR6. The memory clock has been increased slightly to 15 Gbps.

MSI supercharges the RTX 3060 with its top-of-the-line GeForce RTX 3060 Gaming X Trio. This card powers the RTX 3060 with an over-specced VRM solution and a meaty Tri Frozr cooling solution that's optimized for extremely low gaming noise levels, is loaded with all the RGB bling you could ask, and sports high-end looks when installed. MSI is also giving the card its highest factory-overclocked speeds with the maximum GPU Boost frequency set to 1852 MHz (compared to 1777 MHz reference). MSI is not providing any pricing guidance for this card, but we expect it will come at a significant premium over the $329 starting price, which is very unlikely to hold for more than a day or two.

GeForce RTX 3060 Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Shader Units	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
GTX 1060 3 GB	$160	1152	48	1506 MHz	1708 MHz	2002 MHz	GP106	4400M	3 GB, GDDR5, 192-bit
GTX 1060	$210	1280	48	1506 MHz	1708 MHz	2002 MHz	GP106	4400M	6 GB, GDDR5, 192-bit
GTX 1660	$200	1408	48	1530 MHz	1785 MHz	2000 MHz	TU116	6600M	6 GB, GDDR5, 192-bit
GTX 1660 Ti	$270	1536	48	1500 MHz	1770 MHz	1500 MHz	TU116	6600M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2060	$300	1920	48	1365 MHz	1680 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RX 5700	$330	2304	64	1465 MHz	1625 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
GTX 1080	$330	2560	64	1607 MHz	1733 MHz	1251 MHz	GP104	7200M	8 GB, GDDR5X, 256-bit
RTX 2060 Super	$380	2176	64	1470 MHz	1650 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX Vega 64	$400	4096	64	1247 MHz	1546 MHz	953 MHz	Vega 10	12500M	8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
GTX 1080 Ti	$650	3584	88	1481 MHz	1582 MHz	1376 MHz	GP102	12000M	11 GB, GDDR5X, 352-bit
RX 5700 XT	$370	2560	64	1605 MHz	1755 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070	$340	2304	64	1410 MHz	1620 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060	MSRP: $330 Estimate: $420	3584	48	1320 MHz	1777 MHz	1875 MHz	GA106	13250M	12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
MSI RTX 3060 Gaming X Trio	Estimate: $470	3584	48	1320 MHz	1852 MHz	1875 MHz	GA106	13250M	12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2070 Super	$450	2560	64	1605 MHz	1770 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Radeon VII	$680	3840	64	1802 MHz	N/A	1000 MHz	Vega 20	13230M	16 GB, HBM2, 4096-bit
RTX 2080	$600	2944	64	1515 MHz	1710 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Super	$690	3072	64	1650 MHz	1815 MHz	1940 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060 Ti	$700	4864	80	1410 MHz	1665 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Ti	$1000	4352	88	1350 MHz	1545 MHz	1750 MHz	TU102	18600M	11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit
RTX 3070	$750	5888	96	1500 MHz	1725 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800	$850	3840	96	1815 MHz	2105 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800 XT	$1200	4608	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3080	$1000	8704	96	1440 MHz	1710 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	10 GB, GDDR6X, 320-bit