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Today we follow up on our launch day review of Nvidia's RTX 3060 with a look at MSI's RTX 3060 Gaming X Trio. This is a physically massive graphics card that uses the same cooler from MSI's RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio and it's even the same size as the RTX 3090 model. What happens when you take a cooler this big and stick it on a 170W GPU? That is exactly what we'll find out today.
We've reviewed a variety of MSI's Gaming X Trio cards this generation, including the top-tier RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 models. I had thought MSI might be scaling down the design a little for this RTX 3060 Gaming X Trio, but that is not the case – the dimensions of this card are identical to that of the RTX 3090 model.
The cooler isn't quite identical though as there's one less heatpipe found with the RTX 3060, but even so, this is a gigantic RTX 3060 graphics card. With a factory overclocked core, dual 8-pin power connectors and plenty of RGB lighting, we put this card to the test and see whether or not it is worth buying.
| GPU | RTX 3090 | RTX 3080 | RTX 3070 | RTX 3060 Ti | RTX 3060 |
| SMs | 82 | 68 | 46 | 38 | 28 |
| CUDA Cores | 10496 | 8704 | 5888 | 4864 | 3584 |
| Tensor Cores | 328 | 272 | 184 | 152 | 112 |
| RT Cores | 82 | 68 | 46 | 38 | 28 |
| Texture Units | 328 | 272 | 184 | 152 | 112 |
| ROPs | 112 | 96 | 96 | 80 | 48 |
| GPU Boost Clock | 1695 MHz | 1710 MHz | 1725 MHz | 1665 MHz | 1777 MHz |
| Memory Data Rate | 19.5 Gbps | 19 Gbps | 14 Gbps | 14 Gbps | 15 Gbps |
| Total Video Memory | 24GB GDDR6X | 10GB GDDR6X | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 12GB GDDR6 |
| Memory Interface | 384-bit | 320-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 936 GB/Sec | 760 GB/Sec | 448 GB/Sec | 448 GB/Sec | 360 GB/sec |
| TGP | 350W | 320W | 220W | 200W | 170W |
Despite utilising new GA106 silicon, RTX 3060 isn't actually a full implementation of the GPU, as it has 28 streaming multiprocessors (SMs) instead of 30. Currently only RTX 3060 for laptops uses the full GPU. For the desktop chip, 28 SMs means a total of 3584 CUDA Cores, as thanks to Ampere’s new SM structure with its two FP32 datapaths, each SM houses 128 CUDA cores.
Ampere also places one RT core, and four Tensor cores, in each SM, giving a total of 28 RT cores and 112 Tensor cores. This is accompanied by 112 texture units, and 48 ROPs which are now housed directly within each graphics processing cluster (GPC), with 16 ROPs per GPC, and 3 GPCs in total for RTX 3060.
Interestingly, rated clock speed is the highest it has been for an Ampere GPU, coming in at 1777MHz for the reference spec. This MSI Gaming X Trio model however, has increased this to 1852MHz, and we test real-world clock speed behaviour later in this review.
There's been a lot of talk about Nvidia's decision to use 12GB GDDR6 memory for the RTX 3060. This is more than the RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070 and even RTX 3080, but crucially the memory interface is much narrower at 192-bit. With memory clocked at 15Gbps, total memory bandwidth comes in at 360GB/s, about 20% lower than the RTX 3060 Ti.
Lastly, for total graphics power, Nvidia rates the RTX 3060 for 170W, which is 30W less than the RTX 3060 Ti. Despite being factory overclocked, the Gaming X Trio also shares this TGP rating.
