Final words and conclusion
Final words
I've mentioned this in a couple of other reviews as well; ultimately, everything and anything it's all about gaming price, performance, and, of course, rendering quality. The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is a product that meets all these factors suitably; while we do feel the RTX 3070 offers oomph for money, the RTX 3060 Ti simply more reachable for a bigger crowd with a more normalized wallet. This card can still run games at 4K but not with raytracing for sure; it will serve you well at WQHD and Full HD. The easy comparative product would be RTX 2080 SUPER and often even close to that RTX 2080 Ti. And that's not a bad spot to be game performance-wise.
Cooling & noise levels
You've seen the FLIR images; it's not even lighting up. Temps under stress load sits just under 65 degrees C, and that's fine. Acoustics wise this card is a gem; 32 DBa was measured; you cannot hear that if you're further than 30cm away from the card.
Energy
As you have been able to see, we're switching our energy measurements based on PCAT. It's far more precise. This card peaks at 256 Watt (power always fluctuates as much as your frame times and FPS). Averaged out, the card sits at 239 Watt under gaming load, in idle 17 watts. We're fine with all values, albeit it's slightly on the high side for this range.
Coil whine
The TRIO X did well; coil whine was hard to detect, minor at best.
Pricing
NVIDIA is pricing the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti at USD 399. We have not yet received the MSRP for the gaming TRIO X, but knowing MSI, this product will sit on top of that price significantly; the asking price will be 469 USD. But with a predicted low availability, it's hard to really make a solid statement here of prices inflate due to e-tailers hiking up prices.
Tweaking
The graphics card has a solid factory tweak but can be pushed further manually. You'll reach 16 to 16.5 Gbps on the memory, a +100, and for the lucky ones, +150 on the boost frequency (remember that's on top of that factory tweak). Important, slide op that power limiter. More power budget allows the GPU to do what it likes to do the best, go fast. Combined with the tweaks mention on the OC page, you'll sit in the realm of 2000~2100 Mhz on the boost frequency. Remember that values differ per workload and thus the game title. Also, for our tweak to be called valid, it needs to pass four games in a full benchmark run at Ultra HD to be called stable. This specific card end result was pretty impressive, 16.5 Gbps on that memory, a turbo in the ~2100 Mhz domain. Coming from FE, we're roughly 9% faster after manual tweaking.
Conclusion
MSI is back with the TRIO X, and let's be honest .. that model never disappoints. MSI once again nailed it in design and performance. At baseline defaults, the card is 3, maybe 4% faster than the founder edition. When manually tweaked, you'll close in at 10%. The most impressive thing, however, is that this card remains silent, absolutely shockingly silent, and does that with peak GPU temperatures that remain under 65 Degrees C. We can only hope that prices won't be much higher than the founder editions, as that would be a tough sell, with the NVIDIA Founder edition being so good already. This is a product that I like as it offers proper performance at WQHD levels for us common folk. Not just that, you'll have the added benefit of playing some games with hybrid raytracing, as well as the fact that NVIDIA has Tensor cores onboard, offering more perf at complex workloads with DLSS. All-in-all, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti series brings you towards RTX 2080 SUPER performance levels. The 8GB I am fine with as well; I mean, it's the sweet spot in the new mid-range, albeit I find it hard to call it that, as it is high-end performance with added benefits like DLSS and Hybrid Raytracing support. The design, cheer cooling and acoustic performance, and a good tweakability value will bring their product towards a top pick. Let's hope there will be some good availability with a decent price level, as that is the main concern these days. But yeah. Lovely, absolutely lovely.
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- Hilbert, LOAD"*",8,1.
