MSI GEFORCE GTX 1070 GAMING X 8G
The king of value—sort of
LET’S FACE FACTS: The GTX 970, despite its shortcomings, was by far the best card to buy last generation. The GTX 980 Ti may have been more powerful, and the GTX 950 an incredible entry point, but if you were looking for the best possible bang for buck, as far as frame rate performance at 1080p was concerned, the 970 was where it was at. The 1070, then, its Pascal 16nm successor, has a lot to live up to.
With 1,920 CUDA cores, 120 texture units, 64 ROPs, and 8GB GDDR5 VRAM on a 256-bit bus, it’s off to a good start. Although not as powerful as its GTX 1080 cousin (640 fewer CUDA cores and no GDDR5X), the GTX 1070 isn’t one to hang around.
When you break it down, there are three base SKUs available. First you have the Founder’s Edition, featuring a fancy metallic shroud and bumpedup early access fee. Then there are the true reference edition cards from the aftermarket partners, featuring blowerstyle coolers, as well. And finally we have the super-top-end elite cards, such as the Asus Strix or MSI Gaming X, coming with custom PCBs, better power phase design, and generally some fancy combination of RGB lighting and super-cooling technology.
For this review, we decided to skip Nvidia’s Founder’s Edition, and opt for something a little more premium. MSI was gracious enough to offer up its Gaming X card to the bench, and we dove right in. At stock or “silent mode,” MSI’s Gaming X variant performs admirably, almost identically to our reference cooler, with just a few differences. Thanks to the new TORX 2.0 fan technology that MSI has introduced with this edition of its legendary Twin Frozr cooler, the card remains incredibly cool. Coupled with 0dB fan technology, which doesn’t kick in until the card is running at more than 60 C, you’re in for some exceptionally quiet, cool gaming, especially on less demanding titles, such as Hearthstone, DOTA, and their ilk.
Speaking of modes, this is all centered around MSI’s new Gaming App. Designed to work alongside Afterburner and Kombustor, this little executable gives you access to both LED management and preset overclock profiles. The “gaming mode” is the next one up, featuring a meager overclock of 88MHz on the GPU clock. If we’re honest, we’re not sure why this exists, as you also have access to the OC mode, taking the max boost clock all the way up from the stock 1,683MHz to 1,797MHz, a full 114MHz. It doesn’t sound much, but it should net you at least two or three fps extra in most intensive AAA titles.
However, let’s be honest—that’s a little mediocre. Pascal has essentially been nothing short of an architecture shrink, resembling Maxwell in all but transistor size, and sure enough, it remains an exceptional overclocker, as far as architectures go. In our testing, we managed to really ramp the overclock up, achieving a final boost clock of 2,073MHz, almost a full 400MHz higher than stock. In game (FarCryPrimal at 1440p), we saw this increase both our average and minimum frame rates by four or five frames per second. Temperatures remained steady at 70 C under load—alas, we couldn’t push it any harder than this. X MARKS THE SPOT So, is the GTX 1070 the king of cool? Undoubtedly, it’s a powerful card; it performs well at 1440p, providing high frame rates in what we like to call your everyday games, but it just feels as though it needs to be a touch cheaper to really warrant our prestigious and highly coveted Kick Ass award. As far as MSI’s Gaming X variant goes, it’s a solid advancement and nice redesign on the last iteration of Twin Frozr. Our only gripe stems from the inclusion of RGB lighting on a card that is predominantly still red and black. Otherwise, it clocks like a champ, keeps itself incredibly cool, and is one of the quietest cards we’ve ever used. That aside, the armored black and white variant, coming in a little cheaper, and with the same overclock potential, does have our attention. If anything, that little beauty has to be the king of value right now, as far as the GTX 1070 is concerned.