The RTX 2070 card was first released by Nvidia on August 27, 2018 for an MSRP of $499. Micro-Star International (MSI), a Taiwanese company partner of Nvidia, known for its superior graphics cards, also released its card called MSI RTX 2070 Gaming Z at the same time. In this article, we will dissect its characteristics and give you our opinion on this card. It is available online and in particular on Amazon for the price of around $990.
Introducing the MSI RTX 2070 Gaming Z graphics card
The MSI RTX 2070 card has different versions at MSI: Armor, Aero, Ventus, Duke and Gaming. We are going to test the Gaming Z card.
It is a card based on the Turing architecture designed for gamers. It is black and gray in color, quite sober and modern at the same time. This card has 8 GB of GDDR6 memory running at 14 GHz . With the 256 Bit memory bus, the memory has a bandwidth of 448 Gbps . It is a graphics card that can be connected to the PC motherboard via its PCIe 3.0 16x interface. power supply cable is required for connection. The MSI RTX 2070 Gaming Z card consumes a TPD power of 175 Watts . The card measures 307 mm in length and weighs 1.485 kg. It occupies 2 slots in width. It is quite efficient, because it is 59.40% of the RTX 3090. This graphics card has 5 outputs including: 1 HDMI 2.0b, 1 DVI, 2 DisplayPort 1.4 and 1 USB-C.
As for the cooling system, MSI uses 2 Torx 3.0 fans with 2-row ball bearings. The blades have been designed to ensure regular and efficient ventilation. The heatsink has been formed in an aerodynamic design so that it can quickly absorb heat and keep the card temperature below the critical threshold. Zero Frozr technology for cooling. It is a system well proven over several years, ensuring performance and efficiency. The 7th generation of MSI Twin Frozr used allows you to have less noise pollution and lower operating temperatures. The fans automatically turn off when the GPU temperature is below 60°C. The chip is in contact with a nickel-plated copper plate welded to 6 heat pipes containing gas. This allows the temperature to be distributed across the 2 aluminum radiators for better dissipation. The thermal paste used is premium for better efficiency.
You can also customize the RGB LED lighting system via MSI's Mystic Light . There are two LED strips which are arranged around the fans and a third on the edge. With this software, you can also control all your LED lighting peripherals: keyboard, mouse, speaker, headset, etc. Other peripherals from other partners are compatible (Razer, G.skill, Corsair, SteelSeries, Cooler Master, Thermaltake etc. .)
Dragon center software to optimize your system and graphics settings. The latter is equipped with 8 main functions such as System Tuner, System Monitor, LED Wizard, Voice Wizard, Mobile Center, Mobile Center, Shift and Tools & Help. With these, you can directly personalize fan speeds, assign new effects to your LED lighting, easily overclock, activate gaming mode and much more.
With the Turing architecture and the all-new RTX platform, you will benefit from a 6x performance jump compared to previous generation cards. Ray tracing technologies and DLSS optimized by Artificial Intelligence. Ray tracing allows you to have a system of hyper-realistic and totally immersive effects. This system uses a new system for physically calculating the path of light in the graphic scene via the RT cores. Thus, the light goes from the lens towards each object in the scene then towards the different light sources. This new process allows for more realistic effects than ever before.
Performance of the MSI RTX 2070 Gaming Z graphics card
This card has 2304 CUDA cores . For comparison, we have 10752 CUDA cores on the GA102 of the RTX 3090. The GPU of the MSI RTX 2070 Gaming Z runs at 1.410 GHz. When overclocked, the 10.8 billion transistors integrated into the chip switch at 1.62 GHz . The GPU was cast with a 12 nanometer . For comparison, the Apple M1 was engraved via a 5nm engraving process. The MSI RTX 2070 Gaming Z has a texturing speed of 233.3. It supports, among others, the following technologies: DirectX12 Ultimate , OpenGL 4.6 , OpenCL 1.2 , Vulkan 1.2 and CUDA 7.5 .
MSI RTX 2070 Gaming Z graphics card benchmarking
Tested on Fortnite, the MSI RTX 2070 Gaming Z graphics card displays the following performance: in 720p resolution, we measured a frame rate of 255 FPS, in 1080p, the average frame rate obtained is 185 FPS and in QHD/1440p, we we obtained a frame rate of 13 FPS.
In terms of overall performance, the RTX 2070 card is ahead of the GeForce GTX 1080 (91.90%), the Radeon RX Vega 64 (90.20%) and the Radeon RX 5700 (90.10%). However, it is less efficient than the Radeon RX 5700 XT (106.77%), the Radeon RX 5700
Tested on 3GD Mark, the RTX 2070 card obtains a score of 16,117. It is therefore more efficient than the following cards: GeForce RTX 2060 (G3D Mark score 13995), GeForce GTX 1070 (G3D Mark score 13329), Radeon RX 580 (G3D Mark score 8766), Radeon RX 470 (G3D Mark score 7945), Radeon HD 7970 / R9 280X (G3D Mark score 5257), Radeon HD 7950 / R9 280 (G3D Mark score 4775), Radeon R9 270 / R7 370 ( G3D Mark score 4269). On the other hand, it is slower than the following two cards: GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER (G3D Mark score 18093) and the Radeon RX 5700 XT (G3D Mark score 16745).
And on 3DMark, the RTX 2070 card gets a score of 9107. It is more efficient than the AMD Radeon VII (score 8864) and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER (score 8793). However, it is faster than the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary (score 9674) and the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT card at 9541.
In short, the MSI RTX 2070 Gaming Z card is a fairly powerful card. Zero Frozr cooling system ensures operation without overheating and without noise pollution. As for the LED lighting system, it can be controlled via Mystic Light. This card is available online for around $990.
