Conclusion
The review today tested the MSI Radeon RX 7900 XTX GAMING TRIO CLASSIC. We looked specifically at the performance and other associated metrics at 4K resolution and a few select games at 1440 with Ray Tracing. Our comparison was the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition.
Performance
In evaluating plain rasterized performance the MSI Radeon RX 7900 XTX GAMING TRIO CLASSIC will provide you with a very solid gaming experience across the board. All 6 games show fast FPS, even Cyberpunk 2077 is playable out of the box. The addition of FSR simply adds more speed to the mix. In only 1 of 6 games, it is actually needed. The RTX 4080 FE does demonstrate faster results overall, by an aggregate of 10%. However the cards essentially trade blows quite well, it more or less comes down to the game selected.
Ray Tracing is hard on both of these video cards. Our results show that only 2 of 6 games were playable without upscaling and only with the RTX 4080 FE. Upscaling brings 5 games into the playable territory for the RTX 4080 FE and 4 of 6 for the MSI Radeon RX 7900 XTX GAMING TRIO CLASSIC. The RTX 4080 FE had faster-upscaling results across the board as well. These results once again show the experience edge NVIDIA has in Ray Tracing. Regardless, it is nice to see playable Ray Tracing at maximum settings from our MSI RX 7900 XTX GAMING TRIO CLASSIC.
Briefly, in the last paragraph, we did discuss that lowering the resolution from 4K to 1440p may be an excellent choice if you want to have all the effects and faster framerates.
Overclocking
Overclocking this video card was interesting. Due to the dual clock function, a different monitoring software was used, that being HWInfo64. We demonstrated that GPUz only records the slower “shader clocks”. It was shown that in the real world sense, it didn’t matter where we set our overclocking frequency values, the end result was going to be the same. Roughly a 3% gain and no more.
As we demonstrated, even setting the GPU frequency maximum as high as 3425MHz, the result was exactly the same as the 3100MHz setting, in both frequency and FPS. MSI has designed a very nice heatsink and fan setup for this video card. The GPU was always cool and the fans were whisper-quiet. It certainly isn’t a heat issue holding this card back, but one more to do with board power and power limits.
Final Points
In this review, we see that the MSI Radeon RX 7900 XTX GAMING TRIO CLASSIC is a great offering that gives steady playable framerates in plain rasterization and with upscaling enabled, also in Ray Tracing. The video card is well-designed, runs cool, and is very quiet. Ray Tracing results can be improved if the resolution is placed at 1440p. All in all this video card can trade blows with the more expensive NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080.
Overclocking could be better, but this is not necessarily the fault of MSI, but rather the hard stops to power limits in place from AMD for the Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU. It seems to be running at its maximum capability, out-of-the-box. Therefore, you won’t get more performance from overclocking with this video card, but this is not the fault of the design, in fact, it runs very cool for the amount of power it is pushing.
The design is much better than the reference made-by-AMD cooling design in terms of cooling and noise levels. We found that the MSI Radeon RX 7900 XTX GAMING TRIO CLASSIC runs cooler than the made-by-AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, with less noticeable noise while gaming.
While you won’t be able to push it with overclocking, what you will ensure with the MSI Radeon RX 7900 XTX GAMING TRIO CLASSIC is that you are never thermally held back and that you are getting the most performance you can from the video card in its default configuration. While the video card runs at the reference AMD clocks, it does so with grace by using a well-established cooling design, with robust components, from MSI.
If you are considering an upgrade to give you framerates for 4K gaming, this video card will fit the bill nicely and save you some money.