MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Armor 8G review - Introduction

MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Armor 8G review

We review the 3rd iteration of the NVIDIA RTX series, the GeForce RTX 2070 has just landed (and I do mean that literally) for a review. Will the cards that start at 500 USD will have enough oomph to make a difference in the market? Well, let's find out as we have the MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Armor 8G here in the test bench.

Before we begin, there will be a limited scope of reviews during launch week. NVIDIA and its board partners have been extremely late shipping the RTX 2070 card, some of them are stuck in customs, other board partners could not get them shipped in time. Partly the core issue is that a week or so ago NVIDIA told the board partners to ship out a 499 USD product, as well they do need at least one RTX product to make some sense pricing wise. The biggest mistake, however, is that NVIDIA made the call to not supply founder edition cards. So yes, this was a disaster waiting to happen, it has been one the typical pre-launch mess. However, we'll start off with this preliminary MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Armor 8G, and tackle other cards when they arrive.

So yes, the 3rd RTX card also comes with the Turing architecture of the new GPUs, offering a fundamental change in the graphics card arena as next to your normal shading engine, NVIDIA has added RT (Raytracing) cores, as well as Tensor (AI), cores onto the new GPUs, and these are active. Is Turing is the start of the next 20 years of gaming graphics? Well, that all depends on the actual adoption rate in the software houses, they guys and girls that develop games and a dozen or so RTX games are in development and a dozen or so announced titles will make use of deep learning DLSS running utilizing the Tensor cores. For the new RTX series, it's mostly about Raytracing though. So welcome to a long row of RTX reviews. We start off with the reference cards and will follow with the AIB cards as for whatever reason NVIDIA figured it to be an okay thing for them to launch everything at once. First a quick recap of what's tested in this article, a bit of architecture and then we'll dive into real-world testing of course. NVIDIA last month announced the 499 USD GeForce RTX 2070. This 185 Watt car will have 2304 shader procs. It has a 1410 MHz base clock and a 1710 MHz boost clock for the standard founder version. The AIB cards are allowed to be clocked at 1620 MHz on that boost frequency. The card has 8GB of the now familiar GDDR6 memory running a 256-bit wide bus (448 GB/s), the price is 499 USD and 599 for the founders' version. That means the cheapest of cheap AIB card will sit at the 500 USD marker, realistically though we expect them all to sit on the 550~600 USD ranges. But even 500 USD is already a steep price for a product in this performance range.

So I already explained that for the launch reviews, NVIDIA pretty much told the board partners to send the cheaper SKUs, the 499 USD parts. In this review that'll be the MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Armor 8G. The Armor 8G graphics card comes customized with the reference clocks being a 1620 MHz Boost. The memory clock as well runs reference at 14 Gbps. This card remains passive up-to roughly 60 Degrees C and having the smaller TU106 silicon with close to 11 Billion transistors it doesn't run too hot. The cooler is dual-slot design. The card comes fitted with two power headers one 8-pin, the other 6-pin header, included is a nice dragon logo themed back-plate The card offers one HDMI ports and three DisplayPort outputs and the new Virtual link (USB) connector.  This Turing 106 GPU empowered product keeps that GPU at roughly 70 Degrees C marker depending on game load. Though the GDDR6 memory has been not been tweaked, the new Micron ICs are a stock 14 GHz (effective clock-rate) but can be bumped upward towards 15 to 16 GHz with the flick of your fingers. Have a quick peek above and then dive into the full review.