MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio 10 GB GDDR6X Graphics Card Review – 2nd Generation Tri-Frozr Cooling Put To The Test!

Conclusion - A Big Upgrade For Gamers!

MSI's GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio is an insanely fast graphics card considering its price versus the previous flagship, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Coupled with a new cooling solution, a brand new aesthetic and a nice factory overclock, the graphics card delivers amazing performance at a $60 US premium.

The sample I received was able to run way past its rated boost clocks of 1815 MHz and average around 2045 MHz while gaming. The most interesting part about the Gaming X Trio is that within Afterburner, you could increase the power limit by just 3% which is much lower than what the Founders Edition has to offer out of the box (+16%). That raises the total board power to 350W while the factory configured card runs at 340W. There's so little you can do with this amount of power and hence MSI has stated that they will be releasing higher-binned Ampere variants in the near future so expect Lightning to really push Ampere to its limits.

As fir the cooling solution, the new Gaming X Trio design is built for the power-hungry Ampere chips and does a pretty good job keeping the card under 75C even in stress tests. For gaming, the average temperatures were around 64-68C. The card isn't that bulky and should fit inside most cases with relative ease and the triple-fan solution comes with 0db fan technology which unless or until you're touching 60C won't spin at all. This allows lower noise levels when you're not doing any graphics-intensive tasks.

The RGB is not overdone and the Mystic Light cuts on the front and sides provide really good aesthetics of the card itself. MSI is charging a $60 US premium for its GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio graphics card. This price is in-line with other variants that were listed yesterday however, we don't know if anyone can get hands-on the cards considering the entire situation that took place yesterday. If you can find the GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio for around $760 US or close, then it's a great option with a nice factory overclock which grants you a few extra FPS in games. Aside from that, the cooler is top-notch and the custom-designed PCB makes sure that the RTX 3080 GPU maintains its higher clock speeds stable throughout your gaming experience for performance that easily outperforms the gargantuan GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Lightning Z.

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