Review of the MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Gaming X Trio.

NVIDIA has officially introduced its GeForce RTX 3060 “Ampere” graphics card, and the MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Gaming X Trio represents the company’s high-end version of this latest midrange product. Traditionally, NVIDIA has generated a significant portion of its revenue from gamers purchasing new graphics architectures within its xx60 series, a trend that dates back to the 9600 GT, which NVIDIA designates as the “sweetspot.” Graphics cards in this category provide sufficient performance to enable users to play games at maximum settings in standard resolutions or at elevated resolutions with adjusted settings.

The new GeForce RTX 3060 retains the “sweetspot” entry price, 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 latest GeForce Ampere architecture represents the second generation of RTX Technology, integrating advanced Ampere CUDA cores that support simultaneous FP32 and INT32 mathematical operations. It features second-generation RT cores that enhance intersection performance twofold compared to the prior generation, dedicated hardware for ray-traced motion blur effects, and third-generation Tensor cores that utilize the sparsity phenomenon in neural networks to substantially boost AI inference performance.

The GeForce RTX 3060 is equipped with 3,584 Ampere CUDA cores, 112 Tensor cores of the third generation, 28 RT cores based on the Ampere architecture, 112 texture mapping units (TMUs), and 48 raster operation pipelines (ROPs). NVIDIA enhances the offering by increasing the memory capacity to 12 GB, which is double that of the RTX 2060. The specifications for memory bus width and type remain consistent at 192-bit GDDR6, while the memory clock has seen a modest increase to 15 Gbps.

MSI enhances the performance of the RTX 3060 with its premier GeForce RTX 3060 Gaming X Trio. This graphics card features an advanced VRM solution and a robust Tri Frozr cooling system designed to maintain exceptionally low noise levels during gaming. It is adorned with an abundance of RGB lighting and presents a sophisticated aesthetic when installed. Additionally, MSI has equipped this card with its highest factory-overclocked speeds, achieving a maximum GPU Boost frequency of 1852 MHz, surpassing the reference speed of 1777 MHz. While MSI has not disclosed any pricing information for this model, it is anticipated that the cost will be significantly higher than the initial price point, which is unlikely to remain valid for more than a day or two.