MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Gaming OC Review

Introduction

MSI’s GeForce RTX 5060 Gaming OC is one of the most premium custom design RTX 5060 cards you can buy. It combines the value proposition of the RTX 5060 for gamers to play at 1080p, with high-end looks and cooling from a segment above, including some RGB lighting. The board design pairs well with MSI’s MPG line of performance-segment motherboards. Despite its premium looks and cooling heft, the RTX 5060 Gaming OC from MSI meets NVIDIA’s SFF-Ready specification for maximum compatibility with smaller cases. The GeForce RTX 5060 brings the power of the latest Blackwell graphics architecture to the mid-range, including all the features NVIDIA introduced with this generation, such as DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation, which should prove valuable in this segment.

NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5060 comes in at a crucial starting price of $300, which makes it possible to build a 1080p gaming PC under $800. It is designed to offer 1080p gameplay with high to extreme settings, including fairly high ray tracing settings. DLSS 4 transforms your gameplay, unlocking higher frame rates. You can even take advantage of DLAA to further improve image quality over native resolution. Multi Frame Generation can be a transformational feature for whose with high refresh-rate 1080p monitors. In scenarios where the RTX 5060 is able to put out 60–80 FPS, Multi Frame Generation can bring the frame rates to nearly match the 120-165 Hz refresh rates of such monitors.

The GeForce RTX 5060 is based on NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell graphics architecture, which introduces Neural Rendering, a new technology in 3D graphics that combines objects created by generative AI models with conventional raster 3D scenes much in the same way as RTX brings ray traced objects to it. You already know the awesome capabilities of generative AI models to create photorealistic images and video, along with its impact on gaming. AI hence plays a bigger role in rendering, and isn’t just relegated to the DLSS upscaler. This is made possible due to a new hardware-based scheduler component called the AI Management Processor (AMP), which lets the GPU accelerate AI models and render graphics in tandem.

DLSS 4 sees NVIDIA replace the convoluted neural networks (CNN) based AI models driving its various components, with new Transformer-based AI models, which are significantly more accurate, and improve image quality at every DLSS preset. Multi Frame Generation uses a single conventionally-rendered frame to conjure up to three succeeding frames entirely using AI, effectively quadrupling frame rates. While DLSS 4 super resolution is available even to older RTX 40-series Ada and RTX 30-series Ampere, and DLSS 4 single frame generation even to RTX 40-series; Multi Frame Generation is exclusive to Blackwell for now. This is because the feature relies on hardware flip-metering, a feature being introduced with the Display Engine of Blackwell.

The GeForce RTX 5060 is based on the same GB206 silicon as the RTX 5060 Ti series. While the RTX 5060 Ti maxes out the GB206 by enabling all 36 SM for 4,608 CUDA cores, the RTX 5060 is cut down. It gets 30 SM, which gives it 3,840 CUDA cores. Other specs include 120 Tensor cores, 30 RT cores, 120 TMUs, and 48 ROPs. The memory sub-system is identical to the RTX 5060 Ti, you get 8 GB of 28 Gbps GDDR7 memory across a 128-bit wide memory bus for 448 GB/s of memory bandwidth. This is a significant 64% increase in memory bandwidth 17 Gbps GDDR6 that the RTX 4060 comes with. The GPU also comes with an upgraded PCI-Express 5.0 x8 host interface.

The MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Gaming OC comes with the company’s latest Twin Frozr 10 cooling solution. It has the same aesthetics as the latest Tri Frozr cooler featured in Gaming OC cards based on higher RTX 50-series SKUs. The cooler uses two copper heat pipes that pull heat through a nickel-plated copper baseplate. This fin-stack heatsink is ventilated by two of MSI’s latest generation StormForce axial airflow fan. RGB lighting comes in the form of an illuminated MSI Gaming logo on top of the card. You also get a premium metal backplate. MSI offers factory-overclocked speeds of 2625 MHz compared to 2497 MHz NVIDIA reference. MSI is pricing the card at $330, a small premium over the $300 baseline price.