MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X 8G $440

OH, HOW mid-range has changed over the last few years. Once upon a time, the card to have for anyone wanting a fairly healthy PC was the GTX 660 Ti. It was cost-effective, powerful for its day, and clocked like a champ. However, as the battle lines widen, and GPU prices extend ever upward, our idea of what a mid-range card actually includes has inevitably increased, too.

It isn’t all bad, however, because central processing prowess becomes ever more affordable—offsetting the GPU price with a cheap CPU balances the books, while providing higher frame per second solutions for the same amount of green.

The GTX 1070 is a prime example of this. With performance matching the height of Maxwell’s framerendering capabilities, it’s a card that makes the oncepremium 9 series Titan X affordable, cutting the price by 66 percent. MSI’s Gaming X variant provides an exceptionally fine balance between noise reduction and thermal management. There’s no superfluous RGB lighting here, and the only hint of any “gaming” heritage lies in the small red accents located under the card. Couple that with a powerful stack of 8GB GDDR5X and its bunkerbusting Pascal GPU, and the GTX 1070 dominates 1440p with ease, providing average frame rates well into the 60fps range that every enthusiast with a gaming habit covets.