MSI RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio Review

Introduction

The MSI Gaming X Trio range of cards has proven to be both hugely popular and hugely capable since it first appeared on the market. The combination of MSIs legendary Frozr series of coolers alongside a custom designed PCB extract the most from whatever GPU is found at the heart of the card, and with some aggressive pricing and quality feature sets it is no great surprise that they do so well in the sales charts.

Naturally if there is a new Nvidia GPU around there will be a new MSI Gaming X Trio and with the launch of the GA104 RTX 3070 that’s what we have here today. Already we’ve seen that the RTX 3070 brings RTX 2080 Ti matching performance to the party but for around half the price, and that should be more than enough to convince those of you who are still running Maxwell or Navi cards to upgrade. Pointing out that the RTX 3070 is the price/performance sweet spot is nothing new, so we want to discover what the MSI brings to the party to know if this is the particular model you should set your sights on.

We also want to remind readers that we only care about products we’ve tested. We’re not in the business of speculating what future products might offer. All we care about is what you could buy today because that’s the only thing upon which we can speak empirically.

Technical Specifications

When we reviewed the partner versions of the other new Ampere cards many of them provided additional display outputs, but all three of the RTX 3070s stick to the four options with a combination of DisplayPort and HDMI. The move up to the newest HDMI 2.1 specification is an under-rated upgrade amongst all the performance hoopla, with significantly more bandwidth available than the 2.0 that was on the RTX 2080 series. As more and more people seek high refresh rate displays it’s nice to know that your connection method isn’t limited to DisplayPort only to maximise the resolution and refresh rate of your panel.