The RTX 3080 has taken the electronic market by storm. The performance and the low price of the RTX 3080 are outstanding all in all. The aftermarket cards have been hitting the shelves with tons of RTX 3080 variants aside from the founder edition.
The MSI Gaming X Trio RTX 3080 is a monstrous card for its price. A worthy competitor amongst all of the RTX 3080 in the market. The MSI Gaming X Trio RTX 3080 has a beefy heatsink to cool the GPU and a graphene backplate to draw out more heat.
The triple cooler design and let alone the overclocking power of the Gaming X Trio makes it no doubt one of the best. So what is so great about this Gaming X Trio RTX 3080? Let’s check it out.
General Overview – A Closer Look
The MSI Gaming X Trio is a colossus card. The card is massive with its large heatsink and thick heat pipes. The heatsink is longer than the PCB, and the broad heatsink fin array allows for better airflow plus efficient cooling.
The thick copper heat pipes run through the card as the massive heatsink makes the graphics card quite heavy. The MSI Torx 4.0 fan is quite impressive, with its ten fins designed to pull huge amounts of air. The fans have a heptagon design.
The MSI Gaming X Trio runs cooler and quieter thanks to the massive heatsink. The card also supports a zero RPM mode and will spin when needed to. The card is 323mm long, so we suggest getting a larger case for the card.
Unlike the Founder’s Edition RTX 3080, the MSI Gaming X Trio comes with a 3 x 8-pin connector. The MSI Gaming X Trio RTX 3080 doesn’t come with a 12-pin connector like the Founder’s Edition. But don’t get it wrong, you will need a lot of power on the card.
There is no splitter cable, so you will need a beefy power supply to run the card. The MSI Gaming X Trio is 2.5 slots wide and has four output ports. It comes with 3 x display port and one single HDMI port.
There is no VR USB C port. The RTX 3080 uses HDMI 2.1 port, meaning supporting up to 8K display. The graphene backplate on the back of the card looks excellent with an exposed GPU bracket. The RGB looks like it was kept in haste with text on the side and a light bar.
The MSI Gaming X Trio comes with 10 GB of GDDR6X VRAM. The MSI Gaming X Trio has the same base clock speed of 1.44 GHz but boosts to 1.81 GHz. A 100 Mhz faster than the Founder’s Edition.
The RTX 3080 comes with the GA102 GPU with 8704 CUDA cores, using the 2nd Generation Ray-Tracing cores and 3rd Generation Tensor cores. It supports the latest DLSS 2.0 and DirectX 12.
It utilizes the PCIe 4.0 speeds and is VR ready. The RTX 3080 card does show some great promise thanks to the newer architecture, but it does draw more power, significantly performing a great time to time.
Test Bench / Test Setup:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X (16-core, up to 4.7GHz)CPU Cooler: Deepcool Castle 360EX
RAM: 64GB GSkill Trident Z @ 3,600MHz
Motherboard: Asrock X570 Taichi
SSD: Samsung 860 EVO
Power Supply: Silverstone Strider Gold S Series
Case: Praxis Wetbench
Benchmarks:
So we will be testing all the cards in 1440p and 4K. The 1080p is out of the equation, as it shows minimal GPU use. The difference between the cards truly shines when tested in higher resolution like 1440p and 4K. As the resolution increases, the game demands tons of GPU resources utilizing the GPU’s full capacity.
Fire Strike Ultra
3D Mark Port Royale (DXR)
Time Spy Extreme
Shadow Of The Tomb Raider
Highest Preset with TAA and DX12 API.
4K |
Control
Highest Preset with 4x MSAA and DX12 API.
4K |
Metro Exodus
Ultra Preset with DX12 API
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Ultra HD with DX11 API.
Far Cry New Dawn
Ultra Preset with HD Texture pack and DX11 API.
4K |
Power Consumption
Temperatures
31 / 71 |
Pricing
The MSI Gaming X Trio RTX 3080 goes for around $799 in the market. Looking at the price, it is a great deal considering its overall performance. It is a substantial generational leap and shows a dominant performance against the RTX 2000 series GPU.
The top of the line RTX 2080 went for around $1000, whereas the RTX 3080 delivers more power and faster processing speed for $699, and the AIB cards start from $749. So the pricing is excellent for the massive custom RTX 3080.
Final Words
The MSI Gaming X Trio RTX 3080 is an excellent card for its price. We are very much impressed with the custom cards from MSI. The AIB partner delivered a superb card for an absolute banger of a price tag.
Nvidia states the RTX 3080 to perform twice as fast as the older RTX 2080. It doesn’t stack up looking at the benchmark, but it does win over the first generation RTX cards. It has great performance in games in 1440p and 4K gaming.
Thanks to the newer generation RT cores pushes a lot of frames in ray-traced games. It fully utilizes the DLSS feature enhancing the RTX experience in-game. The RTX 3080 outputs a lot of fps in 4K without DLSS enabled.
It draws a lot of power over 400 Watts to need a beefy power supply. The MSI Gaming X Trio gives a 7% increase in performance over the Founder’s Edition. The 3 x 8-pin power supply allows the card to be overclocked to even faster clock speed.
More games utilize the RTX feature in their games, so getting RTX 3080 means gearing up for the future. The RTX 3080 pushes frames far and wide and even supports a higher refresh rate monitor at a higher resolution.
144Hz 4K display? The card can push frames efficiently for the 4K display and supports a 4 x 5K display. It also outputs 8K display for the higher-end 8K TVs.
The pricing is an excellent factor increasing the value of the RTX 3080. It costs half of the RTX 2080 Ti, and it has better performance than the RTX 2080 Ti. We have to see more RTX 3080 AIB cards and see how they stack against each other.
The Pascal card owner finally decided to upgrade to the latest RTX 30 series card. The Founder’s Edition looks to be the best card as of right now. But if you want the premium build and higher boost clock/ overclocking potential of the RTX 3080, the MSI Gaming X Trio RTX 3080 is a great choice. You won’t regret buying it.
