MSI RTX 3090 Gaming X Trio Review

Up Close

It amuses us that so much of the focus on the box is to do with the cooler. It’s almost like MSI are holding up their hands, accepting that nobody is going to buy this on a whim, and so instead have rightly put all their energies into explaining why you should buy this particular take upon the RTX 3090 formula. We don’t blame them at all.

  
  

The Tri Frozr 2 cooler has the fourth generation of the TORX fans, designed to push lots of air without creating tons of airflow noise. The curves edges and surround deflectors help minimise turbulence, and as anyone who understands jet engines knows, the movement of air is always way louder than any mechanical noise from the fan actually spinning.

  

Beneath this flat black backplate there are thermal pads and heatpipes to help keep the rear memory modules cool. After all, you can’t put 24 1GB GDDR6X modules on a PCB without some of them ending up on the underside of the PCB, and the MSI backplate does a lot to keep them cool.

  

The side view will be familiar to anyone who has owned a Gaming X Trio branded card before, although the three 8pin PCIe power connectors will come as something of a surprise. The Gigabyte we’re also reviewing today only has two, so we’ll be interested in seeing the power draw graphs near the tail end of these pages.

  

There is thicker copper on the MSI PCB than is the Nvidia standard to help keep things cool. As well as the solidity of the build – check out the cross brace in the above photo – the addition of supplied support bracket ensures there is zero chance of your card sagging or drooping or whatever other scare stories you’ll find on internet forums. It’s a belt and braces approach.

  

These are the business ends of a cooling solution that works throughout the full length of the Tri Frozr 2 cooler, beginning with full contact heatpipes on the GPU and working through every inch of the heatsink to get the generated temperatures as far away from the GPU as possible, improving thermal headroom and thus card performance.

  

Outputs are a single HDMI 2.1, the updated version which supports up to 8K gaming, and three DisplayPort 1.4 connectors.