In recent times it seemed that finding a high-level video card under 1000 euros had become impossible. Today, thankfully, that’s no longer the case thanks to the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti and Radeon RX 7900 XT. Let’s see one interesting proposal by MSI, the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Gaming-X Trio.
That by now it is necessary to make sacrifices to get a high-end video card, unfortunately, should be a fact known to all. Even after the intoxicating perfect storm caused by the pandemic, the shortage of electronic material and the now burst cryptocurrency bubble, prices are struggling to return to the levels of five or six years ago, when video cards costing a salary were very few and, usually, limited to custom versions with large heatsinks or very special technical devices. However, there are many signs of an improvement in the situation and the arrival of the new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, video cards that we absolutely would not struggle to define as medium-high range, for less than 1000 euros is certainly among them.
ADA LOVELACE IN “OPTIMAL” CONFIGURATION
La GPU GeForce RTX 4070 Ti it is based on the Ada Lovelace architecture (the same as the older sisters 4090 and 4080), is built on the basis of a 4nm manufacturing process and has 7,680 Cuda Cores grouped into 60 streaming multiprocessors. Each of these ‘clusters’ for parallel computing also has an RT unit (that is, a logic for hardware processing of ray tracing effects), 4 tensor cores (logical units for processing artificial intelligence algorithms) and 4 traditional texture units, followed by a total of 80 ROPs for the entire processor.
There are many signs of the improvement of the GPU situation: the arrival of the new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti for less than € 1000 is certainly among them
In the case of MSI’s Gaming-X Trio card, this GPU can reach a maximum frequency of 2,745 MHz (135 MHz more than the reference frequencies for Nvidia’s founder edition), while the GDDR6X memory bus is 192 bits wide . The VRAM amounts to 12 GB and travels at 21 Gbps, for a transmission bandwidth of 504 GB/s.
The dialogue with the motherboard, on the other hand, takes place through a fourth generation PCI Express x16 connector. The declared consumption for this card is 285 Watt, therefore lower than the 300W limit, after which it is preferable to use the new 16-pin 12VHPWR connector, foreseen by the ATX 3.0 standard. Yet this is exactly the “plug” adopted by MSI for this card.
we advise you not to go too far below a good 750 Watt power supply for this board
Those who do not yet have an ATX 3.0 power supply, however, do not worry: in the box you will also find an adapter that allows you to use, in complete serenity, two classic 8-pin PCIe power connectors each, which should be quietly made available by all models on the market for several years. In any case, considering the typical consumption of the other components of a gaming PC, we advise you not to go too far below a good 750 Watt power supply for this card. In our tests, we used two different ATX 2.x power supplies, 750 and 850 Watts, without problems.
A HUGE CARD
The first thing that strikes you about this card is its size: 34 centimeters long, 14 centimeters wide and three slots thick (6.2 cm) certainly do not go unnoticed, although the weight of 1.62 kg is all in all contained. The heatsink used by the company is the Tri Frozr 3, consisting of a copper plate (in contact with the chips), surmounted by a massive lamellar body crossed by 6 heat pipes, on which three generous cooling fans rest. On the rear side of the PCB we find a metal reinforcement plate, with a window positioned under the central processor and a small selector, on the upper side, which allows us to choose one of the two BIOSes available.
There are two options: gaming and silent, but the use of the second – which keeps the working frequencies unchanged and reduces the fan switch-on times – doesn’t make much sense, given that the card in gaming mode is incredibly quiet and, most of the time, you can’t even hear it. Finally, the side with the metal mask and the video outputs has numerous slits, as well as a rather standard range of connectors: three DisplayPort 1.4a and one HDMI 2.1, with which it is possible to drive as many screens up to 240 Hz at 4K or 60 Hz resolution at 8k. Like other MSI proposals, the 4070 Ti Gaming X Trio is also equipped with RGB Mystic Light lighting, which can be synchronized with the motherboard via its management software.
THE PERFORMANCE OF THE MSI GEFORCE RTX 4070 TI GAMING-X TRIO
Once the board is mounted in the testbed (a PC consisting of a Ryzen 5 7600X processor with 32GB GDDR5 memory, Gigabyte Aorus Master motherboard and 4th generation PCI Express NVMe SSD drive), the card offered performance comparable to, and sometimes better than, the immediately preceding generation high-end models Radeon RX 6950 XT and GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, practically tying with the competing Radeon RX 7900 XTbut sold at a slightly lower price. These, in any case, are the framerates that we have observed on some reference games:
Respectable values, which ensure good playability with all the titles in question (“Tomb Raider” is “Shadow of the Tomb Raider”, abbreviated for space reasons) even at 4k, where both Dead Space and the demanding Cyberpunk 2077 have touched the 60 fps that we consider the threshold of fluidity. I don’t know if you’ve already read the our performance review of The Last of Us Part I, however with this card – and a central processor of the same level – it had achieved 62 fps at 4k. Do we want something more? We are spoiled for choice: Like all recent GeForce cards, the RTX 4070 Ti supports three intelligent upscaling and super sampling technologies: DLSS, FSR and XeSS, promoted by Nvidia, AMD and Intel respectively. And it doesn’t matter if FSR and XeSS are somehow “concurrent”, being open source they work great here too. Where available in the games, however, we preferred to test the “reference” technology and therefore the DLSS. Here are the results:
Just compare these numbers with those in the table above to see how effective these technologies are, especially at high resolutions. The owners of 4K and ultrawide UWQHD monitors clearly benefit from it, while at lower resolutions, with this card, there is practically no reason to use itAnd. The application of FSR 1.0 on Far Cry 6 disappoints a bit but, in all honesty, the starting framerates are already more than optimal for playing without problems. In all cases we have always opted for the qualitatively better settings at the expense of performance.
WHY YES, WHY NO
GeForce RTX 4070 Ti cards, in general, represent a good investment for those who intend to play optimally with a large screen, be it an ultrawide 3440×1440 pixel or a normal 16:9 with 4K resolution, remaining below the threshold of 1000 euros. The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming-X Trio, in particular, offers a small increase in GPU boost speed, as well as a decent overclocking window, in exchange for an exaggeratedly large but unquestionably efficient heatsink. In short, we would advise against it only to those who do not have a case spacious enough to accommodate it.
The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, in general, is a good investment for those who intend to play optimally on a large screen while remaining below the thousand euro threshold
With regard to the competition, the Nvidia GPU turns out to be faster than the Radeon RX 7900 XT (about 830 euros) by activating ray tracing, while in traditional rendering the parts are reversed. If we average the framerates we obtained in the different situations, however, the two cards are roughly equivalentmaking the choice a question of sympathy, of perceived reliability (there are those who in the past found themselves better in one field than in the other) and of the software they intend to use beyond the game (think above all of applications scientific and artificial intelligence, the new emerging use for video cards), because otherwise they both offer interesting technologies, DLSS and FSR2 in primis.
Vote: 9.4
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