MSI RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio Review

1. Introduction2. MSI RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. 3DMark Port Royal6. Control7. Death Stranding8. The Division 29. Far Cry New Dawn10. Gears 511. Ghost Recon: Breakpoint12. Metro Exodus13. Middle Earth: Shadow of War14. Red Dead Redemption 215. Shadow of the Tomb Raider16. Total War Saga: Troy17. Performance Summary (11 Game Average)18. Cost Per Frame Analysis19. Clock Speed20. Temperatures21. Acoustics22. Power Consumption23. Performance Per Watt24. Overclocking25. Closing Thoughts26. View All Pages

After the launch of Nvidia's RTX 3070 Founders Edition earlier this week, today we take a look at our first custom model. The MSI RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio has an MSRP of £539.99 here in the UK and comes with an increased power limit compared to Nvidia's reference design, alongside a factory overclocked core and a simply huge cooler. We put this card through its paces and see how it compares to Nvidia's dinky Founders Edition.

At first glance, you would be forgiven for thinking this is actually one of MSI's RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 designs. That's because the RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio is undboutedly a huge card, and it appears to be re-using the same shroud design as its bigger brothers, though the internal heatsink and cooler layout is a little different.

While this graphics card may not have the same diminutive appearance as the Founders Edition then, we would hope the significantly larger cooler will do a better job at keeping the GPU cool, while also reducing noise levels. We put that hypothesis to the test today.

GPU	RTX 3090	RTX 3080	RTX 3070	RTX 2080 Ti (FE)	RTX 2080 SUPER
SMs	82	68	46	68	48
CUDA Cores	10496	8704	5888	4352	3072
Tensor Cores	328	272	184	544	384
RT Cores	82	68	46	68	48
Texture Units	328	272	184	272	192
ROPs	112	96	96	88	64
GPU Boost Clock	1695 MHz	1710 MHz	1725 MHz	1635 MHz	1815 MHz
Memory Data Rate	19.5 Gbps	19 Gbps	14 Gbps	14 Gbps	15.5 Gbps
Total Video Memory	24GB GDDR6X	10GB GDDR6X	8GB GDDR6	11GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6
Memory Interface	384-bit	320-bit	256-bit	352-bit	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	936 GB/Sec	760 GB/Sec	448 GB/Sec	616 GB/sec	496.1 GB/sec
TGP	350W	320W	220W	260W	250W

To recap its core spec, unlike its more expensive RTX 30-series brethren, the RTX 3070 uses Nvidia’s GA104 GPU, instead of GA102. This implementation of GA104 incorporates 46 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), and thanks to Ampere’s new SM structure with its two FP32 datapaths, each SM houses 128 CUDA cores, giving RTX 3070 a total of 5888.

Ampere also places one RT core, and four Tensor cores, in each SM, giving a total of 46 RT cores and 184 Tensor cores. This is accompanied by 184 texture units, and 96 ROPs which are now housed directly within each graphics processing cluster (GPC), with 16 ROPs per GPC, and 6 GPCs in total for RTX 3070.

Clock speed is slightly higher than the RTX 3080. Where the RTX 3070 Founders Edition has a reference clock of 1725MHz, MSI has pushed this to 1830MHz boost. The power limit has also increased from 220W up to 240W.

Lastly, for the memory, RTX 3070 has ditched GDDR6X and we are back to 8GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 memory, operating over a 256-bit bus, for total memory bandwidth of 448 GB/Sec.

Become a Patron!