Final Thoughts
While MSI did release the RTX 2070 Super Gaming X after the official “Super” launch I think that it is a great option for an RTX 2070 Super, especially if you are a someone who is just going to install this card and put it to use. MSI gave this card a 30 MHz overclock, which is not enough to really be noticeable in games, but it is a free boost in performance that you don’t have to do yourself. You can push this card even further, but do note that the manual adjustment power limit is only 240W so that will complicate manual overclocking a little bit. That is why I say if you are just going to install this card and not mess with clocks this is a great card.
First you have the Twin Frozr 7 cooling design, which is one of the better cooling solutions I’ve seen on a graphics card in a while. Over the years we’ve seen the Twin Frozr design evolve, and it is good to see that MSI is continually improving things. We observed a load temperature of 65C, which is one of the best results we’ve seen from cards in this class, on top of that the cooler was virtually silent during operation and of course when the card is idle the fans turn completely off.
I really like how MSI has approached RGB lighting on their Gaming X models recently. You have RGB lighting behind the MSI logo on the side of the card and then little RGB accents around the fans. This works out really well and is not too much in your face like we’ve seen in the past. So you’ll definitely notice the card in a build, but it will not take away from other parts of your build. Talking about looks the metal full-cover backplate on the card is beautiful and of course is going to help with stability and cooling.
When it comes to performance pretty much all RTX 2070 Supers are the same. You are going to easily be able to game at 1080p at super-high frame rates perfect for those high refresh rate monitors. At 1440p you are also going to achieve very high frame rates in AAA titles, in our testing it was around 80-110 FPS at the highest settings so we can say the RTX 2070 is definitely “THE” 1440p card. You can definitely game at 4K and over 60 FPS with this card, but depending on the title you may need to turn the settings down a bit. Comparing this card to others out there you are typically going to see better performance than an RX 5700 XT in most titles and it will beat out an older GTX 1080 Ti too. It is however still slower than a RTX 2080, but not by much.
Another thing that this card does have over AMD models or older GTX cards is of course real-time ray tracing and DLSS. While most gamers agree that turning ray tracing on is not worth it (unless you are playing a single-player game) we do think that if a game you play a lot supports DLSS it is worth getting an NVIDIA card to get the extra performance boost DLSS offers.
MSI gives this card a $49 premium over the reference RTX 2070 Super so it is $549.99 at our favorite online retailer. While the 30 MHz GPU overclock and refernece-clocked memory is not worth that premium we do believe that the cooling solution really is. We were so impressed by its performance and the fact that even during load it was barely audible. This is definitely an RTX 2070 Super that we can recommend, overall ThinkComputers gives the MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Super Gaming X a 9 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award!
Pros:
– Factory overclock
– Great cooling performance
– Fans are very quiet, even during full load
– Fans turn off when not in use
– Sleek design with full metal backplate
– Anti-sag brace included
Cons:
– Memory left at reference speeds
– Manual adjustment power limit is only 240W
