With the GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming X, MSI has yet another high-end graphics card in its portfolio, which features a decent factory OC as well as a custom PCB and custom cooler. Apparently MSI's Gaming series graphics cards are always very interesting cards to have a look at, since almost always they're amongst the best cards money can buy.


Presentation

MSI was amongst the first Nvidia add-in-card (AIC) introducing a custom GTX 1070 graphics card which is using NVIDIAs latest GP104-200-A1 Pascal chip. For this graphics card, MSI makes use of a custom PCB along side another updated version of their Twin Frozr VI cooler. On the backside of the card, there is a good looking backplate. A quick glance at the specs also reveals that this card ships factory overclocked.

Browsing the specifications of this card we find 1920 CUDA cores, 120 TMUs and 64 ROPs. For comparison reasons, the GTX 970 featured 1664 CUDA cores, 104 TMUs and 56 ROPs. This means that, compared to the same model from the previous generation, there are significantly more CUDA cores, TMUs and ROPs. Looking at clock speeds we find a base clock set to 1'607 MHz and the boost clock is at 1'797 MHz, whereas the NVIDIA reference cards runs at 1506MHz/1683MHz, therefore there is a solid 6.8% factory overclock on the GPU.



As we already mentioned, MSI decided to use a factory-overclock on their new GTX 1070 Gaming X. While the reference GTX 1070 is set to work at 1506 MHz for the base clock and 1683 MHz for the GPU boost clock, the GTX 1070 Gaming X runs at 1'607 MHz base clock and 1'797 MHz boost clock.

When it comes to memory clock speeds we see the memory running at default clock speeds which is 2002 MHz and effective 8008 MHz. Combine this with a 256 Bit memory interface and you end up with a total of 256.3 Gigabyte of memory bandwidth.

Whereas the typical boost clock is set at 1'797 MHz, the maximum boost of 1987 MHz was achieved quite easily and the GTX 1070 Gaming X held that clock most of the load time due to the capable Twin Frozr VI cooler as well as good TDP target (nVidia's Boost technology being power-based and not temperature-based on this card). At this point we also ran Furmark to see how high the card overclocks, when the GPU is under maximum load. This way we can determine a worst case scenario regarding maximum boost clock. With this card we see clocks speeds of 1936 MHz at 1.012v.

Specifications

	MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming X 8G	MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming Z 8G	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070
Chip	GP104-200-A1 Pascal	GP104-200-A1 Pascal	GP104-200-A1 Pascal
Process	16 nm	16 nm	16 nm
Transistors	7.20 billion	7.20 billion	7.20 billion
GPU clock	1'607 MHz	1'632 MHz	1'506 MHz
GPU Boost clock	1'797 MHz	1'835 MHz	1'683 MHz
Memory	8'192 MB	8'192 MB	6'144 MB
Memory clock	2002 (8'008) MHz	2002 (8'008) MHz	2'002 (8'008) MHz
Memory interface	256 Bit	256 Bit	256 Bit
Memory bandwidth	256.3 GB/s	259.5 GB/s	256.3 GB/s
Shader Cores	1'920	1'920	1'920
TMUs	120	120	120
ROPs	64	64	64
TDP	150 Watt	150 Watt	150 Watt
PCB Type	Custom	Custom	Reference Design
Slots	2	2	2
Cooler	Twin Frozr VI	Twin Frozr VI	NVIDIA Reference
Launch Price			$379

Page 1 - Presentation / Specifications	Page 11 - Doom OpenGL 4.5
Page 2 - The card	Page 12 - Far Cry Primal
Page 3 - Photo Gallery / Delivery	Page 13 - GTA V
Page 4 - Test Setup	Page 14 - Rainbow Six Siege
Page 5 - 3DMark Time Spy DX12	Page 15 - Total War Warhammer DX11 & DX12
Page 6 - 3DMark Fire Strike / Extreme / Ultra	Page 16 - XCOM 2
Page 7 - 3DMark VRMark	Page 17 - Power Consumption
Page 8 - SteamVR	Page 18 - Temperatures / Noise Levels
Page 9 - ArmA 3	Page 19 - Performance Index & Price
Page 10 - Ashes of Singularity DX11 & DX12	Page 20 - Conclusion