MSI RTX 2070 SUPER Gaming X Trio 8GB Review

1. Introduction2. MSI RTX 2070 SUPER Gaming X Trio3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy (1080p, 1440p, 4K)5. 3DMark Port Royal (1440p DXR)6. Battlefield V (1080p, 1440p, 4K)7. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (1080p, 1440p, 4K)8. Far Cry 5 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)9. Ghost Recon: Wildlands (1080p, 1440p, 4K)10. Metro Exodus (1080p, 1440p, 4K)11. Middle Earth: Shadow of War (1080p, 1440p, 4K)12. Shadow of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 1440p, 4K)13. Battlefield V w/ DXR (1080p, 1440p, 4K)14. Shadow of the Tomb Raider w/ DXR (1080p, 1440p, 4K)15. Clock Speed16. Temperatures17. Acoustics18. Power Consumption19. Overclocking: 3DMark and Games20. Overclocking: Temperatures, Acoustics, Power21. Closing Thoughts22. View All Pages

It's been a frenetic few days in the PC hardware industry. Nvidia took us all by surprise with the timing of its SUPER graphics card launch on July 2, while AMD followed that up with both Navi and Ryzen 3000 launching on July 7. Today things continue with the launch of custom RTX SUPER cards from Nvidia's partners. The card we are looking at is the RTX 2070 SUPER Gaming X Trio from MSI – could this be the 2070 SUPER to beat?

MSI's Gaming X series is well known for producing high-quality cards that are often factory overclocked to the limits. While this is a very beefy card, with a triple-fan cooler and 7 heatpipes, it is slightly disappointing to see the GPU has only been factory overclocked by 30MHz – from the reference speed of 1770MHz, up to 1800MHz. How much of a difference that will make in games, we'll have to see.

As for pricing, ahead of launch MSI hasn't been able to tell us an exact figure, but we were told £550 ‘plus or minus' £20, so between £530-570. Bearing in mind the fact that the Founders Edition retails for £475, you will be paying at least £55 extra for this MSI model, potentially rising to a £95 price premium. Is it worth the extra money?

GPU	RTX 2080 (FE)	RTX 2070 SUPER	RTX 2070 (FE)	RTX 2060 SUPER	RTX 2060 (FE)
SMs	46	40	36	34	30
CUDA Cores	2944	2560	2304	2176	1920
Tensor Cores	368	320	288	272	240
Tensor FLOPS	85	72	63	57.4	51.6
RT Cores	46	40	36	34	30
Texture Units	184	160	144	136	120
ROPs	64	64	64	64	48
Rays Cast	8 Giga Rays	7 Giga Rays	6 Giga Rays	6 Giga Rays	5 Giga Rays
GPU Boost Clock	1800 MHz	1770 MHz	1710 MHz	1650 MHz	1680 MHz
Memory Data Rate	14 Gbps	14 Gbps	14 Gbps	14 Gbps	14 Gbps
Total Video Memory	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	6GB GDDR6
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	192-bit
Memory Bandwidth	448 GB/sec	448 GB/sec	448 GB/sec	448 GB/sec	336.1 GB/sec
TDP	225W	215W	185W	175W	160W

As a RTX 2070 SUPER, this card is built on a cut-down TU104 GPU, the same GPU that forms the basis of the RTX 2080. RTX 2080 has 46 SMs and 2944 CUDA cores, but 2070 SUPER reduces this to 40 SMs and 2560 CUDA cores, which is still 256 more than the vanilla RTX 2070.

Alongside this, the card is equipped with 8GB of GDDR6 memory, running at 14Gbps over a 256-bit bus. As we will see on the next page, the memory chips themselves are from Micron.

Clock speed is rated at 1800MHz as we mentioned, though interestingly this has not affected the rated power consumption, as MSI claims it's still 215W just like the slower-clocked Founders Edition.

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