I won't describe the performance of the card here, I think everyone can imagine that according to their parameters and benchmarks that are commonly available. I think that most potential buyers of such a powerful yet compact card are primarily interested in its cooling. As of the date of writing the review (February 2024), only one manufacturer besides MSI offered such a powerful card in a version for cases with smaller space for a graphics card, other manufacturers offered only larger, three-fan cards. Therefore, the question about the cooling quality is quite legitimate (I was personally very interested in it before I decided to "take the risk", which is why I am writing a resume here). I am pleasantly surprised to find that cooling is not a problem in a well-ventilated cabinet! The card even performs better in terms of temperature at most times than the similarly sized 3060 Ti from an unnamed competitor I had before.
It should be said straight away that the factory set fan power is subjectively too low - it is set so that you really can't hear the card at all, but at the cost of too high temperatures in my opinion (having a standard of around 85 degrees on a hotspot doesn't seem ideal to me). Fortunately, by easily tweaking the cooling curves to increase the fan power by 15-20% on average, the card is very well cooled without being significantly noisy. (you can do this tuning through MSI Afterburner or other similar software) At this point it is worth mentioning that compared to the competition, the card offers potentially really extremely high fan speeds (the competition usually ends around 2 thousand, this card goes up to 3 thousand). Although these extreme speeds are not used in the native settings (or I guess I couldn't reach temperatures where they would trigger), they do offer an interesting fallback option in case of overheating. However, it should be noted that if you set the speed over 2,500 rpm, the fans start to get very noisy indeed, but (as I mentioned) these are values that other manufacturers often don't even offer, so I consider this a positive. Card temperatures after fine tuning the cooling curve are completely negligible during normal operation. When gaming, when the core and memory are at full load but full RT is not engaged, the card also stays well-cooled (max 70 degrees GPU, 75 hotspot and VRAM). If the card is really running at full speed (i.e. RT is used to its full extent - e.g. in Cyberpunk), the temperature rises a bit outside the comfort zone, but still stays below 80 on the core and below 86 on the hotspot. Finally, I would like to mention that MSI did not avoid an affair with an allegedly faulty VBIOS of the card at the time of release, which led to the card not delivering the required performance. MSI reacted quickly and almost immediately released a new version of VBIOS, which they made available for download from their website with an installer. The tool is intuitive and there is no problem with updating VBIOS. However, I think it is worth mentioning, because the need to rewrite the firmware of a newly purchased graphics card is definitely not something that is standard (I have not personally encountered this yet, and I have replaced many graphics cards from different manufacturers). To summarize, the card offers very interesting performance in a compact package with a reasonable amount of cooling, plus it comes with a three-year warranty, making it a very attractive choice for people who need a smaller card but want a more powerful one (it is quite possibly the most powerful card you can get in this size). However, if you can fit a larger card in your case, I think it's definitely a safer choice to buy the larger version. It is also a fact that it is good to have a little more advanced PC knowledge to keep it running smoothly, as it is necessary to upgrade VBIOS and it is also advisable to adjust the cooling curves.