Anyone interested in manual overclocking probably will not be overly enthused with what the MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio has to offer. This is in no shape nor form a slight against this video card. Instead, that statement will be true of any RTX 3060 Ti that respects NVIDIA limits and comes factory overclocked with the limits already pushed for you. In this case this means that instead of a default of 200 watts the board limit is set to rather aggressive 240 watts. Instead of 1665Mhz, the boost is configured for 1830Mhz. Instead of a mediocre cooling solution you get that beastly Tri Frozr 2.That combination means the core will be basically live above 1920Mhz in the real world. Out. Of. The. Box.
Thanks to NIVIDA, MSI is limited in how much further you can go on the wattage end of the spectrum, and if you do decide that 1920’ish is not enough, do not be surprised to see that you can only push this hard limit up by 4.167(ish) percent – or 250 watts board power draw limit. Ten watts is still ten watts, but unless you get a golden GA104-200 core this really will only mean low 2K range as that is the real limit here. Not cooling. Not voltage. Just simple power draw. In testing we did routinely see peaks in the 2040 range but long term gaming average was more in the 2010 to 2020 range. That still is an extra 100Mhz of power, but like we said, MSI has done the heavy lifting for you and that is why this card carries such a premium price tag.
With all that said, the memory side of things is a bit more positive and if you can not push the octo-pump GDDR6 from its ‘stock’ 1750 to 2000Mhz… you have a really, really bad set of RAM ICs on the card. We actually pushed things to 2100 but dialed it back to 2050Mhz as we like to be conservative and keep the RAM from dying an early death. This still is an ‘effective’ frequency of “16,400MHz”, and instead of 448GB/s memory bandwidth this bad boy now had 525GB/s memory pushing power. We doubt many will notice at 1440P or lower resolutions this difference, but that extra 77GB/s of bandwidth may indeed come in handy at 4K resolutions.
Overall, this is a nice and easy card to overclock, but we doubt many will bother to do so considering you get nearly all the performance right out of the box. Just the way it should be on a premium GPU.
