Custom air cooling
It doesn’t get much better than the MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Gaming X Trio. With the king of the Ampere architecture under its hood and a sleek cooler studded with RGB lighting, this card serves up everything you could possibly want in spades.
With a boost clock of 1,920MHz, 10,752 CUDA cores, and a whopping 24GB of GDDR6X memory, this card is on the cutting edge of performance. While it may no longer be the latest and greatest, it is still among the fastest cards on the planet.
The other highlight is the Tri Frozr 2 cooler, featuring three 10-blade Torx 4.0 fans. The fans utilise double ball bearings for improved durability, while generous thermal pads provide additional heat dissipation capacity across the rest of the board. The fan blades are also linked in pairs to help channel air through the heatsink.
The cooling design brings the heat pipes in direct contact with the GPU die. These pipes are machined to ensure they are perfectly smooth, maximising
the surface area and heat transfer efficiency.
The heatsink itself is also equipped with deflectors to improve airflow dynamics. These deflectors provide additional surface area and guide air to where it is needed for better cooling. Elsewhere, what MSI calls wave-curved 2.0 fin edges further help disrupt unwanted airflow harmonics in order to reduce noise. Even the VRAM modules are covered by a dedicated copper baseplate for improved heat dissipation, so no component has been neglected.
There is even support for semi-passive operation. Zero Frozr tech lets the fans completely stop spinning when your GPU isn't working as hard..
The PCB itself is a custom design that features additional fuses for extra safeguards against electrical damage. It also uses a 2oz thickened copper for better conductivity, improved heat dissipation, and enhanced reliability.
But MSI is fully aware that this is a very, very large and heavy card. A rigid metal antibending plate ensures the structural integrity of the PCB, so it never bends under the weight of the massive heatsink. To top it off, a bundled support bracket can be attached to your PC case for even more reinforcement.
A separate metal backplate protects the PCB, complete with a bracket that encircles the GPU die for still more rigidity.
The card measures 325 x 140 x 62mm, so you'll definitely want to check how much clearance you have in your case before going out to grab one.
ALL THE PERFORMANCE YOU’D WANT FROM A TOP-END CUSTOM RTX 3090 TI WITH THE VERY BEST OF AIR COOLING.
It is powered by the new16-pin connector, which helps reduce the number of cables you have to grapple with. MSI is recommending an 850W power supply unit to go with it, but I can see many enthusiasts opting for a higher wattage 1000W unit for peace of mind.
For our benchmarks, we compared the MSI
GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Gaming X Trio against the liquid-cooled Gigabyte Aorus GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Xtreme Waterforce 24G.
The Gigabyte card has a slightly more aggressive boost clock of 1,935MHz, compared to the MSI's 1,920MHz, and managed to edge ahead by a hair in most benchmarks. However, once we reach 4K and especially with ray tracing, both cards are neck-and-neck.
Thermal performance is really the main differentiator, and that's why we picked the liquid-cooled Aorus Waterforce to highlight this. It was able to stay much cooler with an over 10°C gap, but a considerably higher power draw of over 100W over the MSI.
At S$3,299, the MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Gaming X Trio sits at the tippytop of custom cards, complete with a hefty feature set to boot. If you want an air-cooled beast, it definitely won't disappoint you.
However, this isn't a card that will make it into most builds. With its steep price tag and monster performance, few will need the sheer power it offers and even fewer will be able to stomach the price. Having said that, if you're feeling flush, it is well worth a look.
TESTED & RATED
8.5/10