Actually, based on the listings at Newegg, it’s the most affordable RTX 4090 card available overall, at $1700, which is why I asked MSI for a chance to run this card through our extensive tests to determine whether this RTX 4090 is able to compete with the more expensive offerings available, which go up $2600—almost $1000 more.

The GeForce RTX 4090 is NVIDIA’s top dog, built using the mammoth AD102 graphics processor, which comes with 76.3 billion transistors, 16,384 GPU cores, 24 GB GDDR6X over a 384-bit wide bus and support for all the newest technologies like DLSS 3 Frame Generation, improved tensor cores, faster ray tracing and shader-execution reordering.

MSI’s GeForce RTX 4090 Gaming X Trio that we test in this review is a custom-design implementation with a large triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution. The VRM design is a powerful 18+4 configuration with the Monolithic MP2891 controller. At the same time the card is carefully designed to not break, yet offer the same fantastic experience that other, more expensive RTX 4090 cards deliver. In terms of factory overclocks you’re getting an increase of 75 MHz GPU frequency over the NVIDIA Founders Edition, or 3%. As mentioned before, while MSI is pricing their card competitively against other offerings, there’s still a $100 increase over the $1,600 NVIDIA RTX 4090 MSRP.

The MSI Gaming X is dominated by black, with various shades of gray as highlights. On the rear you’ll find a high-quality metal backplate.

NVIDIA introduced the concept of dual NVDEC and NVENC Codecs with the Ada architecture. This means there are two independent sets of hardware-accelerators; so you can encode and decode two streams of video in parallel or one stream at double the FPS rate. The new 8th Gen NVENC now accelerates AV1 encoding, besides HEVC. You also get an “optical flow accelerator” unit that is able to calculate intermediate frames for videos, to smooth playback. The same hardware unit is used for frame generation in DLSS 3.

MSI’s RTX 4090 Gaming X Trio comes with a more cost-efficient cooler than the Suprim X. While the Suprim X uses a vapor-chamber base, the Gaming X uses a classic solid baseplate design. Other parts of the cooler have also been designed to be less expensive, which makes perfect sense if you’re building a custom-design that’s targeted at lower price points. Our apples-to-apples cooler comparison test confirms that the Gaming X cooler is among the weaker ones of all the RTX 4090s that I’ve tested so far. The range between best and worst air cooler is 9°C at the same fan noise and heat load—not that much. The Gaming X Trio’s cooler is still more powerful than that on the NVIDIA Founders Edition, by around 5°C.

The good news is that MSI did the right thing and found perfect fan settings, given the RTX 4090 GPU’s heat output and the cooler’s capabilities. With the default (silent) BIOS, the card runs very quietly, making it quieter than most other non-MSI RTX 4090 models that we’ve tested. Only the super-expensive ASUS STRIX when switched to the quiet BIOS is a little bit quieter—all the other RTX 4090s from all the big vendors are louder—pretty impressive. Temperatures. which are higher than other cards are still good, reaching 72°C on the GPU, 81°C on the hot spot and 72°C on the memory. Nothing to lose sleep over about. Still, if you prefer lower temperatures, MSI has you covered. Switch to the “Gaming” BIOS, which runs a more aggressive fan curve that brings down temperatures by around 5°C. This fan setting is still pretty quiet with 34 dBA, roughly matching the Founders Edition.