NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Review Ft. MSI, GALAX & PNY – $249 Would’ve Made This GPU Perfect

MSI GeForce RTX 4060 Gaming X Unboxing & Closeup

The MSI GeForce RTX 4060 Gaming X graphics card comes inside a standard cardboard box. The front of the package has a large "GeForce RTX" brand logo along with the "MSI" logo in the top left corner and the "Gaming X" series branding in the lower-left corner. A large picture of the graphics card itself is depicted on the front which gives a nice preview of the Gaming X design.

The packaging has put a large emphasis on the RTX side of things as the first feature enlisted by AIBs will be NVIDIA Ada architecture, Ray Tracing & DLSS support. NVIDIA has bet the future of their gaming GPUs on Ray Tracing support as these are the first cards to offer support for the new feature.

The back of the box is very typical, highlighting the main features and specifications of the cards. The three key aspects of MSI's top-tier custom cards are its blazing performance which is achieved by a fully custom design, the new Twin Frozr 9 cooling system, and a new Torx Fan 5.0 fan and Core Pipe design which will offer better cooling performance.

There's also a focus towards GeForce.com on each AIB card through which users can download the latest drivers and GeForce Experience application which are a must for gamers to access all feature sets of the new cards.

The sides of the box once again greet us with the large GeForce RTX branding. There's also the mention of 8 GB GDDR6 (RTX 4060) memory available on the card. Outside of the box, the graphics card and the accessory package are held firmly by foam packaging.

The card is nicely wrapped within an anti-static cover which is useful to prevent any unwanted static discharges on various surfaces that might harm the graphics card. After the package is taken care of, I can finally start talking about the card itself. This thing is a beast and I can't wait to test it out to find what kind of performance improvement I get over current-gen cards.

For the RTX 4060, MSI has considered going with dual-fan and dual-slot designs which makes a lot of sense since the GPU doesn't require a lot of cooling. Making the card any bigger isn't going to be a wise decision considering you are going to get the same amount of performance but waste extra space for nothing.

The MSI GeForce RTX 4060 measures 247 x 130 x 41mm, making it a very compact design, and weighs 587 grams. The card looks very nice with its gaming theme in an all-black design. I would love to see MSI going for a single-fan ITX variant of its Gaming design at some point.

The cooling shroud extends all the way to the back of the PCB. The back of the card features a solid backplate that looks stunning. The backplate offers a lot more functionality than just looks which I will get back to in a bit.

In terms of design, we are looking at an updated version of the Twin Frozr 9 heatsink. The Gaming X series has now been around for a while but the Twin Frozr series pre-dates it with the first design going far back to the GeForce 200 series.

The main changes include the shroud and heatsink design that features a neater shroud design on the front which features the claw-shaped pattern on the front and a carbon-fiber touch across the sides of the cards.

Coming to the fans, the card actually features the latest fan designs based on the Torx 5.0 system. Both fans feature a ring-based design to allow for higher airflow to be channeled within the main heatsink. All fans deploy a double ball bearing design and can last a long time while operating silently. Each fan has three blades that form three sets and each fan has three sets of them that make up a total of 9 fan blades. Each blade is tilted at a 22 degrees angle to the main high-pressure airflow.

MSI also features its Zero Frozr technology on the Twin Frozr heatsink. This feature won’t spin the fans on the card unless they reach a certain threshold. In the case of the Twin Frozr heatsink, that limit is set to 60C. If the card is operating under 60C, the fans won’t spin which means no extra noise would be generated.

I am back at talking about the full-coverage, full metal-based backplate that the card uses. The whole plate is made of solid metal with rounded edges that add to the durability of this card. The matte-black finish on the backplate gives a unique aesthetic. The graphics card also comes with a compact PCB design which means that the shroud, heatsink, and backplate are all extended beyond the PCB. The second fan blows air through the heatsink and blows it out from the cutouts that are situated at the very end of the backplate.

There are cutouts in screw placements to easily reach the points on the graphics card. We can also see the iconic MSI Dragon logo.

With the outside of the card done, I will now start taking a glance at what's beneath the hood of the graphics cards.

The large fin stack runs all the way from the front and to the back of the PCB and is so thick that you can barely see through it. It also comes with the wave-curved 2.0 fin stack design which I want to shed some light on as it is a turn away from traditional fin design.

The heatsink has been designed to be denser by using a wave-curved and filled-fin design. It allows more air to pass through the fins smoothly, without causing any turbulence that would result in unwanted noise.

Talking about the heatsink, the block is comprised of 3 Core Pipes with a more concentrated design to transfer heat from the copper base to the heatsink more effectively. The base itself is a solid nickel-plated base plate, transferring heat to the heat pipes in a very effective manner. I/O on the graphics card sticks with the reference scheme which includes three Display Port 1.4a & a single HDMI 2.1 port.

The card ships with a single 8-pin connector so you don't have to worry about using a Gen5 power adapter.

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