The beefy MSI RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio is here, though the dust has hardly settled on the launch of the Nvidia RTX 3080 and Nvidia RTX 3090.. and there’s still so much more to come from both Nvidia and rivals AMD. While the launch of the RTX 3080 hasn’t been a smooth one, with teething troubles in the form of nonexistent stock and some likely fleeting hardware and/or software and/or firmware issues, we come back to the fact that the RTX 3080 is an absolute beast of a GPU that offers awesome value vs. the 2080 Ti.

We had a deep dive look at the Founders Edition, and we were left amazed at the generation-on-generation performance uplift on top of its surprising thermal performance and low noise characteristics. However, there’s always room for improvement and that’s what we expect to see from the top-tier partner cards, including the likes of the Asus Strix, Gigabyte’s Aorus and MSI’s Gaming cards. We generally expect third party cards to be faster, cooler, and quieter.

But does the MSI Gaming X Trio have what it takes to clear the high bar set by the Founders Edition?

The MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio 10G is every bit a premium tier card thanks to its custom PCB design and particularly its highly regarded TriFrozr cooler. It’s a big triple slot card. It’s got tasteful splash of RGB lighting you can control with MSI’s Mystic Light app. Oh, and the backplate is supposedly infused with graphene. Yes, wonder-material graphene.

MSI claims that it improves rigidity while improving the card's heat dissipation capability. Twisting and wrenching tests aren’t a standard part of our benchmark suite, so we’ll have to take MSI’s word for it.

Outputs consist of the standard set of three V1.4a DisplayPort connections and a single HDMI 2.1 port. Perhaps a second HDMI port would have been welcome.

The card makes use of triple 8-pin power connectors that deliver power to a 13 phase VRM with an additional 3 phases for the 10GB of 19 Gbps Micron memory. The PCB is almost sparsely populated, but then it is much larger than the unusually shaped Founders Edition PCB, so that's not really a surprise.

The rated boost clock of the Gaming X Trio is 1,815 MHz, but as we saw with the Turing cards, this number is almost meaningless as the card will consistently clock higher than this. That 1,815 MHz is 105 MHz on top of the Founders Edition, which isn’t a huge jump, but it’s enough to make a difference in the benchmarks.


On a related note, MSI says all of its retail and review sample 3080 Gaming X Trio cards feature an updated CAP implementation, so this should not be causing the crashing problems that are afflicting many RTX 3080’s and RTX 3090’s. The original photography that went around was supposedly based on engineering samples which were never mass produced. Our sample was sent to us pre-release and throughout our testing we've had precisely zero crashes. Well done MSI for getting out ahead of this issue.

The MSI RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio’s true strength lies with its chunky cooler. The TriFrozr knocks it out of the park. It’s got some nice touches like space-age fans, and fins with fancy marketing names, but it’s the end result that matters. It hits the trifecta of being cooler and quieter than the Founders Edition, while delivering higher boost clocks and hence better performance.

During our testing, the chip-chiller couldn’t be heard over the sound of our NZXT AIO cooler. If you crank it up all the way, of course it’s loud, but at no stage did we observe or even get a hint that the cooler was being genuinely stressed.

MSI rarely makes a misstep when it comes to its cooler implementations and the 3080 Gaming X continues this trend.


MSI RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio benchmarks