MSI GeForce RTX 3070 GAMING X TRIO 8GB Review
Temperature, Power and Overclocking
The gaming performance on a graphics card is the most important factor in buying a card, but you also need to be concerned about the noise, temperature and power consumption numbers.
MSI GeForce RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio GPU Temperatures:
At idle on our open air test bench we were sitting at around 32C at idle and while gaming we topped out at 64C after doing some 1440P gaming for about an hour. These are great numbers as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition card had an idle temperature of 33C and hit 70C while gaming. This is a 1C reduction at idle and a 6C reduction at load. Fan noise was never an issue as the fans on the card didn’t run at idle and topped out at only 1200 RPM. This is one of the quietest cards that we have ever used!
Power Consumption
For testing power consumption, we took our test system and plugged it into a Kill-A-Watt power meter. For load numbers we ran Rainbow Six Siege at 1440P and recorded the peak power number while the in-game benchmark was running. This is done to ensure the results are repeatable.
Power consumption on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition on the entire system was around 50 Watts at idle and the peak power draw was 405 Watts. The MSI GeForce RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio used slightly more power on the desktop and the system power draw topped out at 446 Watts while gaming.
One of the new tools that we have to look at power consumption is the NVIDIA Power Capture Analysis Tool (PCAT). NVIDIA came up with custom designed board and software utility that captures accurate perf-per-watt and total graphics board performance data. We’ve had it less than a week, but wanted to try it out for the first time on this review.
Here is a look at total PCIe Power for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition versus the MSI GeForce RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio graphics card. As you can see during load the MSI GeForce RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio uses slightly more power.
Using the data from above we also found minimum, average and maximum power draws for this workload. PCAT shows that the MSI GeForce RTX Gaming X Trio used 288.8 Watts of power at its peak. Since this is reading just the power going to the graphics card that is the total board power being used from the power supply. This just happens to be about 30 Watts higher at the peak and 20.8 Watts more on average. We won’t really talk about idle power here as neither card had a prolonged idle period where the fans kicked off.
Overclocking
To overclock the MSI GeForce RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio graphics card we were told by MSI to use their Afterburner overclocking utility. They provided us a download link to Afterburner 4.6.3 Beta2 that was complied back in September 2020.
Despite being given direct download access to the beta utility, we found that it was unstable and not ready for for the GeForce RTX 3070 launch. We’ve asked MSI to let us know when their utility is ready as we’ll scan the card and see how the auto overclocking feature does.
We manually overclocked the core clock on our MSI card and managed to get it up to 2055MHz on the core clock while gaming. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 FE model that we have topped out at around 1980 MHz, so the extra board power headroom provided on this card does translate into higher overclocks!
Let’s wrap this up!