While it's still early days since the launch of the Nvidia RTX 3080 and Nvidia RTX 3090, the MSI RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio is here.The launch of the RTX 3080 has not been smooth, with stock not existing and temporary hardware and/or software and/or firmware While it has not been smooth, with teething troubles in the form of issues, we fall back on the fact that the RTX 3080 is an absolute beast of a GPU that offers great value versus the 2080 Ti.

We took a deep dive into the Founders Edition and were continually amazed by its amazing thermal performance and low-noise characteristics, as well as its generational performance boost. However, there is always room for improvement, and we expect that from top-tier partner cards such as 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 a premium-class card, thanks to its custom PCB design and especially its acclaimed TriFrozr cooler. It's a big triple slot card, with RGB lighting that can be controlled via MSI's Mystic Light app. And the back plate is infused with graphene. Yes, the wonder material graphene.

MSI claims that it improves the card's ability to dissipate heat while increasing its rigidity. Twisting and writhing tests are not a standard part of our benchmark suite, so we have to take MSI's word for it.

Output consists of a standard set of three V1.4a DisplayPort connections and one HDMI 2.1 port. Perhaps a second HDMI port would have been welcome.

The card uses a triple 8-pin power connector to power a 13-phase VRM with an additional 3 phases for 10GB of 19Gbps Micron memory The PCB is barely implemented, but the Founders Edition much larger than the PCB.

The rated boost clock for the Gaming X Trio is 1,815 MHz, but as we saw with the Turing card, the card always clocks higher than this, so this number is almost meaningless. This 1,815MHz is 105MHz above the Founders Edition, not a huge jump, but enough to make a difference in benchmarks.

On a related note, MSI says that all 3080 Gaming X Trio cards in retail and review samples use the updated CAP implementation, which should not cause the crashing issues that plague many RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 cards. The first photoshoots that circulated were supposedly based on engineering samples that never made it to mass production. Our samples were sent to us prior to release and we had absolutely no crashes throughout our testing. Well done MSI for getting ahead of this issue.

The real strength of the MSI RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio lies in its massive cooler, and the TriFrozr beats it hands down. It has some nice touches, like a space-age fan and fins with fancy marketing names, but it's the end result that matters: a triple whammy of cooler and quieter than the FoundersEdition, but with a higher boost clock and better performance.

During testing, the chip chiller was not audible over the noise of the NZXT AIO cooler. However, there was no indication that the cooler was genuinely stressed, not even a hint.

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

As for performance, the Gaming X is reasonably, if not earth-shatteringly, faster than the Founders Edition. Of the cards tested so far, the Gigabyte Gaming OC has a slight edge thanks to its slightly higher average boost clock. The Gigabyte is louder, however, and if you're running at 4K, 200Hz+, or just a few ultrawides with nothing else going on, you'll love how powerful it is.

Nvidia's Turbo Boost mode is directly affected by temperature levels, so the cooler needs to operate in the right range where noise levels are suppressed while giving the card enough cooling capacity to keep the GPU boosted clock high. MSI is in this sweet spot. position. At 100% load for an extended period of time, the maximum temperature was only 69°C. This allowed the card to consistently boost from 1,950 MHz to 1,985 MHz levels.

Importantly, there were no wild swings, which we assume contributes to the well-known instability issues affecting some cards.

We tried overclocking a bit, but power limiting seemed to kick in quickly, as even a 50 MHz increase was unstable. At least until MSI's Lightning or EVGA's Kingpin comes along and shows us the true power of the GA102 GPU, we won't bother overclocking the 3080.

The MSI RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio is a great example of a high-quality RTX 3080 card. It's cool, quiet, powers through any game at 4K, looks great, and is built like a brick exterior. That is if you can actually afford it. [This is true of all RTX 3080 cards because of their high power consumption; 350-400W is the upper limit of what is acceptable for a graphics card. Where do we go from here: 500W. four 8-pin power connectors. five slots. We haven't gotten there yet, and let's hope we never do. But MSI has tamed the Ampere GPU beast and deserves credit for that.

Nvidia's RTX 3080 is also a relative bargain: at $760, it's one of the more expensive 3080s, but compared to the current 2080 Ti model, it's an absolute bargain; MSI has a reputation for producing excellent graphics cards, and this one is no different. Now for the Lightning overclocked version...