ranzware
The Ventus is a fairly straightforward graphics card. In another life, it might even be close to the RTX 5080‘s MSRP. Since the graphics card market is a bit of a shambles right now, it’s not. Nowhere close. That makes it a tough recommendation, though it is plenty capable in many ways.
The Ventus 3X OC White has three Torx 5.0 fans and measures 303 x 121 x 49 mm, which means it’s not top percentile size or weight for the RTX 50-series. It’s pretty standard fare and should fit inside most cases as a result. The main draw of this particular Ventus 3X model is that it comes in white, though there’s also the more or less the same Ventus OC 3X Plus in black and silver. Don’t be a scaredy-cat though, I promise you’ll find plenty of white PC parts these days to bring a build together, and this clean card should easily match most other components.
Removing the metal backplate and plastic fan shroud, I’m able to get a better look at the nickel-plated copper baseplate and heatsink, which I’ve measured at 27 mm thick. I’m not removing this entirely as I still need to use the card for comparative tests, but between the baseplate covers the memory with individual thermal pads and appears to make good contact. It also makes contact with the power delivery and, again, more thermal pads here.
The baseplate itself erupts out to eight heatpipes, four stubbier ones covering the PCB towards the IO, and four longer ones extending all the way out to the other side of the card. MSI has used a piece of thicker metal as a strengthening structure between the IO plate and across nearly three quarters of the heatsink, which does appear to help with the rigidity of the card in situ on my test bench.
Ventus 3X OC White specs
Oh and a nice touch with the construction of this all-white card is that the shroud’s fan cables are white, too. Little details and all that.
So, how does this card fare in testing? Much like the RTX 5080 Founders Edition for frames per second, though it also runs pretty cool. I measured it at 69°C during three runs of Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition at 4K, which is only a single degree hotter than the Founders Edition in the same test, which I can easily drum up to within test variance.
The MSI card runs a tad slower in this same Metro test compared to Nvidia’s Founders Edition—the Ventus 3X hit an average clock speed of 2654 MHz. The FE managed 2736 MHz. That is slightly explained away by the higher power draw of the FE model versus MSI’s OC card, over 8% higher power draw on average, though you have to wonder what OC stands for if not a higher clock than the FE model.
PC Gamer test platform
Supplied by Cyberpower | MSI
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D | Motherboard: MSI MPG X870E Edge Ti WiFi | RAM: Kingston Fury Beast RGB 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) @ 6,000 MT/s | Cooler: MAG CoreLiquid i360 White | SSD: Spatium M480 Pro 2 TB | PSU: MPG A1000GS PCIe 5 | Case: MAG Pano 100R White
For the record, the Ventus 3X OC Plus is rated to a higher clock speed than the FE model out of the box. That’s 2,640 MHz boost, with an Extreme profile to boost it up to 2655 MHz, available in the MSI Center app. The FE model runs at 2617 MHz. While it’s technically correct to call the Ventus 3X OC a factory overclocked card, it’s one of the slimmest around. As such, it doesn’t mean much when you start talking about actual game clocks, boosting algorithms, and overclocking.
For our Metro test, the Ventus 3X ran at 2654 MHz on average. The FE version ran at 2736 MHz, through what appears a slightly larger thermal envelope and adequate cooling. This stands as a good example of why those two letters ‘OC’ don’t always mean a whole lot today—a GPU will boost beyond its limits on the box if there’s headroom available, and you can tweak this further yourself pretty easily, as we’ll get into now.
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I opted for the standard boost profile for all of my benchmarking, as if you want to go above that, you might as well overclock the card. That’s easy to do with the RTX Blackwell generation, and here’s what I managed to set in MSI Afterburner without much tweaking whatsoever.
- Core clock: +515 MHz
- Memory clock: +800 MHz
With a loop of 3DMark’s Steel Nomad test, I could push in excess of both of these offsets, but I found the card would quickly fall over as soon as I’d run it through Metro Exodus or F1 24. With the settings noted above, I had a clean run through our benchmarks at 1440p and 4K.
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Buy if…
✅ You can get your hands on one for a decent price: If you want an RTX 5080, you might have to pay a pretty penny for one. Ideally, you don’t pay over the odds for this one, however, as it’s not worth any more than its already inflated price.
Don’t buy if…
❌ You want granular overclocking controls: You cannot tweak the power profile of this card, so it’s basically a write-off for serious overclockers.
Though, again, I do have to report that the Ventus 3X OC is bested by the Founders Edition, which reached a higher stable core overclock at +525 MHz. Whether from this marginal overclock or the FE’s natural proclivity for boosting beyond its rated speeds, it ends up performing a little better than the Ventus 3X OC in most games. Homeworld 3 is a bit of an outlier, but this game loves a speedy CPU, and it’s currently enjoying higher frame rates with our 9800X3D than it has previously, which might help explain that one.
One thing to note on the Ventus 3X OC is that, unlike many other cards, the power limit and voltage cannot be tweaked here. It’s locked in. So, if you’re looking to push your card on a more granular level, you can’t do that here, but it does mean that overclocking it is as simple as typing a few digits into Afterburner’s offset and seeing what runs. So long as it’s stable, job done.
There we have it, an ‘OC’ card that runs slower than the Founders Edition for a lot more money right now. If we ignore the fact you cannot buy one of these cards easily today, you should expect to pay around $1,300 for one. That’s $300 more than the Founders Edition MSRP. That’s not a very attractive proposition.
If I’m looking for a silver lining, this might be the card to buy in six months, providing demand has slowed, supply has improved, and AIBs adjust the price premiums they’ve whacked on these things. I’m not taking that bet, however, and I can only review the card in front of me, as it stands today. That means it’s a decent enough card, and one that’d I’d happily stuff into a white PC build, were it not ultimately priced out of consideration.
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Kurt Indovina
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