Is this the RTX 3060 Ti to get??? – MSI RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio

How’s it going everybody welcome to we do tech. So recently we have looked at the MSI SUPRIM range of GPU’s. Today we will look at the MSI Gaming X trio RTX 3060 Ti. Now nvidia has also recently announced a RTX 3060 with 12GB, that’s even more than the 3080, which is weird. But we will talk more about that once we have our sample. But in short if you were wondering which one to get, the 3060 is more for crypto miners and the 3060 Ti which is still the best bang for your buck card you can get, is more for gamers. So then lets get into how this beauty performs just right after this.

Price

Now so far this is the entry level card for the 30 series,it’s retailing for $400. That’s $100 cheaper than its bigger brother the RTX 3070 and will be around $70 more than the 3060. So we might just need to wait and see how the 3060 performs, but i have my doubts.

Specs

Design

Just like the others, the Gaming X trio is definitely a good looking card with an all new design. Thankfully moving away from some of the more questionable design choices made with the last generation, yes all three fans are thankfully the same size this time. 

As for lighting the card has 3 RGB stripes on either side of the middle fan that almost look like claw marks, an illuminated MSI logo on the side and a pretty badly diffused RGB strip running along the top edge of the card which I think would have looked a lot better with a couple more smaller sized LEDs as the current design does have a hot spot where each of the 6 LEDS are. These can all be controlled through MSI’s Dragon Center software 

The fan shroud has an overall angular design, in a black and gunmetal grey color scheme which really works well with the silver accents on the fan.

The Trio Also comes with what MSI is calling a Graphene backplate which is supposed to help make the card more rigid while also helping slightly with cooling.

Cooling

Speaking of cooling MSI has put a lot of effort in designing the cooling system of the card, trying to keep it as cool as possible while still staying quiet and I think they found a pretty good balance. It does run a bit warmer than some of the other cards we looked at but is definitely a lot quieter.

Power

For power the 3060 Ti uses 2x  8 pin connectors with a TDP of 200W but we did see it go to 212W under gaming load. 

For IO you get 1x HDMI 2.1 ports and 3x Display 1.4a  

Benchmarks

So we tested it in 1080p, 1440p and 4K. We did some ray tracing games, some new gen AAA titles and a fast paced multiplayer game.

So our first game we will take a look at is AC Valhalla. This is also the first GPU that we tested on 1080p on Valhalla. So our average was 82 frames and 1% was 62 frames. 1440p We were about 20 frames behind the 3080 and 4K there was only 11 frames difference between the 3060 Ti and the RX 6800

Our first ray tracing title was Watch Dogs Legion. So in 1080p it was amazing, the 3060 Ti actually beat the 3090 in 1080p, with DLSS ON we saw over 70 FPS. 1440p the 3060 Ti started to suffer and barely beat the RX 6800 even with DLSS ON. in 4K the 3060 Ti was well balanced falling right in the middle on the charts. 

The newly released PC dominator Cyberpunk 2077 was next on the list of games. Again this was the first GPU to test on 1080p. So with DLSS on we actually broke the 100FPS mark. But with RT on it dropped to 58, still impressive though. 1440p we saw a 75 FPS with DLSS on but with only RT on we saw a very measly 13 FPS average. 4K we just did for the giggles as we know it would have suffered. So with DLSS we saw 41 FPS, which some might say is playable, but with DLSS and RT on it dropped down to 12FPS, and without DLSS it was completely unplayable doing only 3 FPS. 

Control was our next RT title. Here we got over 100 FPS rasterized tests and almost 160 FPS with DLSS. Even with RT on the card still performed well. Doing over 100FPS with DLSS on and 69 FPS with DLSS OFF. 1440p the 3060 Ti struggled and exchanged a few blows with the 2080 super, we saw that without RT the 2080 Super did better thanks to its higher tensor core count, but when RT came on the 3060 Ti did better thanks to its new second gen RT cores. The same happened in 4K but we still managed to reach over 60 fps with DLSS on. 

COD MW was our fast paced multiplayer game to test. So again here on 1080p the 3060 Ti took the crown and beat the 3070 and 3080, which is remarkable. In 1440p the 3060 ti was only 6 frames behind the 3070 and as well as in 4K being only 6 frames below the 3070 again. But about 30% below the RTX 3080. 

In our synthetic benchmarks Fire strike and time spy. The 3060 Ti was very close to the 2080 super.  In Time spy the 3060 Ti was only 99 points ahead of the 2080 super and in fire strike almost 600 points. 

Conclusion

So then inconclusion does it anyway make sense to get a 12GB card with less CUDA cores. Not really. Yes we need more VRAM for higher resolution games. But even the 3060 Ti with its 8GBs is enough for 1440p and even 4K. 

So now that we have the benchmark results in, we can elaborate some more about this 12GB version that’s coming out. Will it be worth it? Or is it the only option to go for? 

Sure, games are becoming more demanding and 1440p will become the new 1080p.  And then also with technology like AMD’s SAM, it might make more sense having more VRAM for the CPU to have access to. Intel is also working on their own version so being able to get around 10% more frames will be nice but sacrificing on CUDA cores is not the right trade off.

So for me the RTX 3060 Ti is still the best bang for the buck graphics card and combining that with the Gaming X Trio, its one mean combination with great looks, cooling and performance. 

But anyway, depending on when you are watching this you might be wondering if you need to wait for the release of the 3060, and yes that would be smart. But I can already say that I would personally skip the 3060 and rather buy the 3060 Ti. The 3060 has 12GBs of VRAM which is even more than the 3080 which is almost 3 times its price. The only reason the 3060 exists is for Ethereum miners who needs more and faster memory. It is a good thing that Nvidia made the 3060 so that miners would rather go for that card staid of 3060Ti

Now this might seem strange but we have seen this previously as well with the 1060. Where you got a 3GB and a 6GB version. But what makes this really strange is the fact that the 3060 Ti is already very very close in performance to the 3070. So depending on the price the 3060 Ti 12GB version might be an even better buy than the 3070.