MSI Gaming X Trio RTX 3070 Review – The 1440P KING

Trio, the italian word for three. That’s exactly the amount of RTX 3070’s we have here today. And also the next one’s name we are looking at. The MSI Gaming X trio 3070. Obviously the trio is three for the amount of fans it has but this bad boys MSRP should be $500. But we aren’t quite sure exactly what it will be though. Because of limited stock and scalpers.

Specs

But first let’s take a look at the 3070 specs and how it compares to the 3080 and 3090 that’s already been released . So the 3070 has 8GB of GDDR6 ram, where the others offer 10GB of GDDR6X VRAM for the 3080, and 24GB of GDDR6X for the 3090. The 3070 also has 5888 Cuda cores where the 3080 has 8704 and the 3090, 10496.

Design

Moving on to the design, the 3070 Gaming X Trio has an identical design to the MSI gaming X trio 3080 and 3090. Apart from the heatsinks that are slightly different from each other. There would honestly be no way of telling them apart. The backplates have very small differences between them and if you look very closely you can see the RGB is also not identical.

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 cards are all new designs and I must say that they are definitely some of the better looking 30 series cards i’ve seen so far. But the 3070 is exactly the same size as the 2 bigger cards from MSI. With a dimension of 323 x 140 x 56mm.

IO

Now taking a look at the back for the IO you get 3x Display Ports v1.4a and 1x HDMI 2.1 ports

Power 

It has dual 8pin power connectors that with our overclock, drew a max of 280W.  We would recommend at least a 600w power supply. But under gaming load we saw that it ran with 240W most of the time. So maybe you can get away with a 550w. 

Cooling solutions

As for the cooling the Trio comes with MSI’s TriFROZR 2 system. This is pretty much a combination of cooling fins designed to reduce noise, machined heatpipes to make as much contact as possible and their TORX 4 fan design which has 3 pairs of blades linked together to concentrate airflow. The fans also only run when they’re needed so that the card doesn’t make any noise at all when idle.

For cooling, it did a decent job reaching a peak of 71c under full load. With the fans running at 43% being 1400RPM. Our ambient room temps were a bit high though at around 28c. Idle temps were not bad being around 40c most of the time.

Sound

So how loud is the MSI, as they went for the more silent method this time. Our ambient room sound was around 42DB so we will use that as the platform to work off. Under load the MSI went to around 48DB at 65% fan speed and around 1500RPM,  which is very quiet, considering this was an open test bench. With 100% fan speed it went to around 62DB

Looking at overclocking we were able to add an extra 100mhz to the core and 400 to the memory for a slight bump in performance. We saw an average of about 5% increase in the 3 games we tested. Which was AC Odyssey, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and F1 2020. But for most of our tests we kept the card stock, as it is much more stable and not everyone will OC the card once they have it.

Benchmarks

As for the long awaited benchmarks. The system we used was paired with a i9 9900KF @ 5GHz and 64GB of memory running @ 3000MHZ. Also for the people who want a side by side visual comparison we will have one on our other channel WeDoBenchmarks linked in the description along with plenty more comparisons to come.

Now how did the MSI Gaming X tri 3070 perform? So games were much more stable than they were before with the 3080, that’s probably thanks to new drivers and that we didn’t overclock the card. 

We tested on 1080p,1440p and 4K. To see if the 3070 can do all three more balanced, as the 3080 didn’t like 1080p too much. So this was for sure a more balanced card and could handle all three resolutions pretty well. The 3070 fell right in between the 2080 super and 3080. Which makes it the perfect 1440p card in my opinion. Especially seeing that 1440p is becoming more and more popular. It was able to run games on 4K easily, but will most likely struggle with new upcoming AAA titles. 

With the new 30 series cards, Ray tracing will become something more expected to feature in games, as the previous 20 series cards could do it but with a performance knock that was quite noticeable. Where the 30 series cards also have frame decreases but they still stay at a high enough frame rate to make the game enjoyable. 

Conclusion

This card was such a delight to use. I really think that this is the sweet spot for 1440p gamers. You get a ton of horsepower for cheaper than what a 2080 super would have been. Ray tracing can now finally be a setting that you don’t have to worry about, as it handled it with ease. The 3070 Trio X is one of my favorite 30 series cards. As it looks great, performs amazing, it’s quiet and won’t hurt your wallet that much. Well if you are fortunate enough to get your hands on one that is. I know that my next personal GPU will be a 3070, which one I don’t know yet but we will have to wait and see. The 3070 is a good card to upgrade to no matter what resolution you are playing at. Whether you are a frame chaser, or a in game photographer, the 3070 is the card for you.