When it comes to Nvidia’s ultra-dysfunctional RTX
30-series family, the RTX 3060 Ti sticks out as one of the weirdest of the bunch,
kind of like that awkward middle-child that doesn’t get nearly enough attention.
But, just like that awkward middle-child, it has the potential to be amazing. I got your back,
middle-child gang… though I’m actually the youngest sibling…
but still. I gotcha. And in this video, we’ll be taking a look at MSI’s most premium take
on this particular GPU in the form of the RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio.
But before that, if you end up liking the card enough to put a ring on it,
go ahead and do it via my Amazon affiliate links in the description.
It costs you nothing but helps me make more videos like this.
Or if you’re in South Africa, pick it, and everything else you need up at Wootware, my bru.
Now, as the first of the 60-series Ampere cards to make its debut, the RTX 3060 Ti
was a very welcome addition to the family… for about a week and then the regular old RTX 3060
came in to seemingly to spoil all the fun with its stupid 12GB of VRAM and lower price tag.
But, to anyone paying attention, the launch of the RTX 3060 which I took a look at recently,
only made the Ti version all the more appealing.
See, the RTX 3060 Ti, coming in at a starting MSRP of $399, actually shares more in common with the
beefier RTX 3070 than it does with the regular 3060, and that’s obviously a very good thing.
The 3060 Ti ships with 4864 Cuda cores, which is about 35% more than the RTX 3060,
and only about 17% fewer than the RTX 3070. And even though the 3060 features 12GB of VRAM,
four more gigs than both of its superiors, that memory is slower than on both the 3060 Ti
and 3070, making for a weaker memory configuration overall.
The 3060 Ti, or at least Nvidia’s own reference version does sport the lowest
boost clock speed in the bunch at 1.67 GHz, but that’s only by like a hundred megahertz,
and our Gaming X Tro version here sports a max boost clock of 1.83 GHz,
a nice, almost 10% overclock compared to the reference card.
All of this is to say that the 3060 Ti is basically a slightly cut-down version of the 3070
that, if we were living in a world where MSRP meant anything at all,
comes in at 100 bucks cheaper, making the entire thing an extremely good value package.
And our MSI RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X trio here should be no different.
In some other dimension where a pandemic didn’t happen, demand for new hardware wasn’t through
the atmosphere, and factory farm crypto miners planted trees instead of mining, the 3060 Ti
Gaming X Trio would be selling for around 500 bucks. But we don’t live in such a utopian world.
We live in this world, and in this world, if you’re lucky enough and faster than the bots,
you might be able to snag the card new for around $650, or for around
R15,000 if you’re in South Africa. And those are about as low as the prices go right now.
So Uhm, yeah, definitely not the best time to be on the lookout for any new graphics card.
But if you are lucky or patient enough to be able to grab one of these close to MSRP somehow, you’re
going to need to know if it’s any good or not, so let’s take a closer look at the card itself.
If you’ve been following the channel for any length of time,
you’ll know that I’m all too familiar with MSI’s new Gaming X Trio cards.
I’ve already played around with the 3070, 3080, and 3090 versions,
and at this point, the design pretty much haunts my dreams. And not in an entirely bad way.
MSI’s RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio design for this generation didn’t really blow me away when I first
saw it, and it still doesn’t exactly make me feel like taking it out to a nice dinner and a movie.
The overall look of the card is pretty striking in its gameryness,
complete with hard shapes, sharp edges, and dragon logos. Basically, if you ever wanted
a card that’ll advertise your K/D ratio to all of your friends while simultaneously screaming
obscenities at anyone who dares steal your kills, then this is definitely your kind of card.
But even so, it’s not like MSI went TOTALLY overboard with it. The two-toned black and
gray color scheme looks really slick, making it easy to color match with almost any build,
and even though the card exudes gamer energy, the color scheme tones it down
just enough to prevent it from looking gaudy.
And then the RGB comes in baby! MSI dove headfirst
into the deep end of the RGB pool for this generation’s Gaming X Trio cards, I mean,
it’s right up there with MSI’s Suprim lineup in terms of how much lighting they’ve got going on.
The face of the card features two lighting zones that look kind of like claw marks and fit the
whole MSI dragon aesthetic perfectly, another lighting zone for the MSI logo on the side,
and then a massive light strip to cap it all off.
A truly shameless display of RGB if I’ve ever seen one. But, unfortunately, unlike MSI’s own
Suprim cards, the excessive lighting on the Gaming X Trio here falls a little flat for me.
The claw marks on the face of the card, while creative and badass,
just aren’t bright enough, an issue shared by the illuminated logo on the side of the card.
Or maybe they are bright enough, but you just wouldn’t notice it because of how stupendously
bright and in-your-face the lightbar is.
I mean, eyeball scorching brightness is definitely not a bad thing in my book,
but inadequate diffusion, making each LED clearly visible,
isn’t great. It kind of cheapens the whole experience for me.
Oh, and speaking of cheapening out, going with a graphene backplate instead of a metal one
was definitely not a good move, MSI, especially not when you try to sell it as a feature. Yes,
it’s better than nothing, and I’m sure it adds to the card’s durability and rigidity,
but from a cooling and look and feel perspective,
it’s just not good enough compared to what many of your competitors are doing.
Fortunately, the same can’t be said about the rest of the card.
As a whole, the Gaming X Trio’s overall design is solid. Even though the shroud is mostly plastic,
the plastic doesn’t really take away from the look and feel of the card much,
and the card is reassuringly heavy despite all of the plastic it has going on.
And that weight is reassuring because most of it is almost certainly the result of the
ginormous heatsink MSI slapped onto this thing. Well, that and the metal “anti-bending” bracket
in the middle of the card. Oh, and just because I love little extras, I’ve gotta give MSI credit for
including an anti-sag support bracket right in the box, very cool. Even though I’d have
preferred if MSI just melted that down and made a proper backplate out of it. But that’s just me.
Anyway, back to that chonker of a heatsink, along with providing a ton of surface area
for better heat dissipation, it also features an array of heat pipes, thermal pads galore,
and three TORX 4.0 fans which should be more than enough to keep things nice and cool.
We’ll take a look at the card’s thermal performance to see just how cool in a minute,
but first, let’s get down to business and throw the card into the benchmark gauntlet.
The test bench we’re rocking for this round of testing features AMD’s Ryzen 7 3800XT
clocked at 4.5 GHz, slotted into MSI’s X570 Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard, along with the epic kit of
Crucial Ballistix RGB memory clocked at 3600 MHz CL16 which I recently reviewed on the channel.
CPU cooling is left up to MSI’s MAG Coreliquid 360R,
while Antec’s EAG Pro 750W brings the power, Crucial’s P5 NVME brings the storage,
and we’ve got it all looking sexy in MSI’s MAG Sekira 500X case.
To kick things off, we’ll start at 1080p,
and what’s immediately evident is just how perfectly the 3060 Ti slots in
between the 3060 and 3070, almost like that’s where it was always meant to land. Which it was.
And even though I expected that the 3060 Ti would be closer in terms of performance to the
3070 than to the 3060, I wasn’t expecting just how close it would come in some of these games.
Of course in other titles, the difference between the two is much more pronounced,
but still a fantastic showing for the 3060 Ti.
A showing that continues with the bump to 1440p, where the 3060 Ti doesn’t struggle
to keep up with the 3070 nearly as much as the 3060. It’s at these higher resolutions
that we start to see how little the 3060’s extra VRAM counts when it comes to raw performance.
With the numbers we’re seeing here, I’d have zero trouble recommending the card for 1440p gaming,
something that’s especially impressive considering
that we’re running all of these games at cranked quality settings.
Speaking of cranking the quality, let’s move on to 4K.
And it’s here where the 3060 Ti starts to stumble a little, although to be fair,
so do pretty much all of the cards I included in this benchmark run. 4K, 60+FPS using high to
max quality settings just isn’t a realistic scenario for a lot of the games I tested.
And keeping that in mind, the 3060 Ti kind of killed it,
hardly ever dipping below what I’d consider playable frame rates.
To call this an ideal card for 4K gaming would be a stretch,
but it’s by no means out of the question. Just drop quality settings down a notch or two and
the card should be able to hit or surpass at least 60 FPS in all of the games I tested.
To wrap things up, let’s take a quick look at the card’s ray tracing performance,
an area where AMD is unfortunately still playing the catchup game with Nvidia.
And we’ve got another fairly predictable result, with the card coming in with a very playable
experience all around, and at 1440p no less. The only upset comes in the form of Metro Exodus,
where the card posted numbers far closer to the 3060 than the 3070,
but luckily the same doesn’t go for the rest of the games I tested.
The RTX 3060 Ti is clearly a no-nonsense performer regardless of the games you
want to throw at it, and our Gaming X Trio version here continues that trend.
The card boosted to a max core clock of 2025 MHz during testing,
which about matches the highest clock I saw on the 3070, and quite a bit higher than the 3060.
A clock speed it hit even though things got a little toasty,
with the card maxing out at 70 degrees with an ambient temp of 23 degrees.
While I did personally expect the card to come in just under the 70-degree mark, it’s not a bad
temp at all, especially considering the card only ever spun its fans up to 45% power or 1320 RPM.
That’s a very low RPM and resulted in the card barely being audible over the
rest of the components in the system, even with the case side panels off.
Although I didn’t spend a lot of time overclocking the card, I have no doubt
that there’s even more performance to be had here if you did. At 100% fan speed the card has a lot
more thermal headroom for overclocking, hitting a max temp of just 54 degrees.
Now, with all of that said and done,
it’s time to draw some sort of conclusion out of this whole thing. And that would’ve
been incredibly easy if we weren’t stuck in some sort of GPU market fever dream.
The 3060 Ti really is a phenomenal chip,
one that frankly makes the RTX 3070 and 3060 look like chumps, and from what I’ve seen online,
also gives AMD’s RX 6700 XT (which costs more and isn’t great for ray tracing) a run for its money.
And it’s because of all of that that this video is incredibly frustrating to make.
Because as much as I want to tell you to go out and buy this thing right damned now, I just can’t.
These cards don’t even come close to being worth it at the prices they’re selling for right now,
and that’s assuming that they’re even in stock at all. And the same goes for
practically any card out there with more than 4 gigs of VRAM.
Honestly, until the GPU market starts to normalize
sometime within the next decade, just don’t even bother, unless of course you enjoy being
ripped off. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, you kinky freak, you.
Anyway, the hugest of thanks to MSI for letting me play around with the card, it’s basically like
letting me play with gold at this point and an equally big thanks to all of you for watching.
Remember to buy all of your things via my Amazon affiliate links in the
description to help the channel out, and if you’re in South Africa don’t
be dom and make sure you’re buying all of your tech stuff at Wootware.
So yeah, I’ma head out, cheers.