MSI RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio 8GB in test – Heavy chunk on quiet soles

1 - Intro, Technical Data and Test System 2 - Teardown, PCB and Cooler 3 - Gaming Performance 4 - Power Consumption and PSU Recommendation 5 - Temperatures, Clock Rate and Noise 6 - Conclusion and Final Words

Temperatures and Boost Cycle

The card will boot if it is cool enough and the GPU load does not exceed 50% to over 2070 MHz. However, this is a very short-term pleasure, which then collapses in my very extremely demanding test game with increasing temperature in the closed case from 1980 MHz to about 1935 MHz. But this is still far above what NVIDIA officially states for the boost. However, to beat the Founders Edition by a wide margin, it’s enough. The GPU is a maximum of 59 to 60 °C, maybe even a bit warmer in poorly ventilated cases. But the huge radiator always seems extremely sovereign.

The manual overclocking resulted in a value of 2100 MHz at 100% fan speed, which the card could even hold most of the time. But whether one would like to endure this acoustically is a matter of opinion. I think a block of water will do. You can still overclock the memory a bit, but you lose performance before reaching the stability limit. All in all, the overclocking potential is rather meagre.

Let us now come to the recording with the high-resolution infrared camera. The PI640 from Optris has a true 640 x 480 pixel bolometer and records at up to 30 FPS. I use here the normal lens and calibrated foil with a known transmittance so that I can de facto look inside the closed housing. The backplate can be removed, but you can subtract about 3 degrees from the memory with the backplate mounted and about 4 degrees from the voltage transformer, which also underlines the sense of this solution.

And what about the consequences of global warming of graphics cards? Now, of course, I am interested in the noise level of what is now emitted as complex fan noise. The card in open construction is a bit cooler, which also speeds up the fan speeds of the closed case from around 1300 rpm to almost 1380 rpm. But then you still don’t really hear that.

Let us now turn to the noise level and the sound character. With approx. 33.2 dB at Witcher 3 in UHD and a power consumption of approx. 240 Watt I measured a clearly lower value than the Founders Edition, whereby even the extreme case with less than 35 dB(A) did not offer hurricane qualities. If you use Furmark or heavy GPGPU scenarios, where the memory and voltage converters are also more demanding, then it’s still just under 250 watts, but the fan speeds go slightly over 1400 rpm and the noise level is then 35.7 dB(A) in the poorly ventilated case. However, I have not been able to do this for games. Seen in this light, the world is then also in order again and it stands and falls with the airflow in the housing.