Introduction

MSI GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Gaming X Trio is the company’s most premium custom-design graphics card based on NVIDIA’s latest mid-range addition to its RTX 40-series product stack. The card offers, above all, a premium design that looks like it’s from a segment above. A well-designed cooler shroud holds a trio of the company’s latest-generation TorX fans, which ventilate a TriFrozr 3 cooling solution. The cooler has a neatly-executed RGB LED element. The card also features the company’s highest factory-overclock with the RTX 4060 Ti.

The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Ada is designed to solidify NVIDIA’s footing in the hotly contested mid-range, with a starting price of $400 (unchanged from that of the RTX 3060 Ti). It is based on the company’s latest Ada Lovelace graphics architecture, which means you get the performance/Watt benefits of the 5 nm foundry node, and exclusive new features such as DLSS 3, a feature by NVIDIA that leverages the Optical Flow Accelerator and Tensor cores, to generate whole frames in gameplay entirely using AI, without involving the graphics rendering machinery. DLSS 3 gains importance in this segment to enable usage of ray tracing, consistent high FPS, or both.

The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti debuts the new 5 nm AD106 silicon to the desktop segment, which it nearly maxes out, featuring 34 out of 36 SM (streaming multiprocessors), which translate to 4,352 CUDA cores, 136 Tensor cores, 34 RT cores, 136 TMUs, and 48 ROPs. While 8 GB of GDDR6 memory is unchanged over the previous generation, NVIDIA has narrowed the memory bus to 128-bit wide. This may seem controversial given its predecessor’s 256-bit interface, but NVIDIA has a good explanation for it, which involves large on-die caches, that reduce the dependence on video memory for some of the most frequently accessed data.

The GeForce Ada graphics architecture debuts the latest generation CUDA cores with increased IPC and higher clock speeds, more capable RT cores that accelerate more ray tracing effects on the hardware, and 4th generation Tensor cores with support for newer math formats. The switch to 5 nm means that the typical graphics power of the RTX 4060 Ti is 160 W at reference speeds, which also means premium custom-designs like the MSI RTX 4060 Ti Gaming X Trio can make do with single 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and don’t really need the modern 16-pin 12VHPWR connector. MSI is giving the RTX 4060 Ti Gaming X Trio factory-overclocked speeds of 2670 MHz boost, compared to 2535 MHz reference boost. The memory ticks at stock 18 Gbps speeds. MSI is pricing the RTX 4060 Ti Gaming X Trio at $460, a pretty serious premium over the $399 MSRP that brings it close to the $499 MSRP of the upcoming 16 GB variant.