MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ventus 3X Overview
Taking a first look at the RTX 4070 Ventus 3X it definitely is one of the smaller cards I’ve seen in the 40 series. I feel like most RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 cards are just massive and this card just seems like a normal card. This is a Ventus card from MSI so it does have the typical Ventus styling that we are used to. Three cooling fans surrounded by a mostly silver shroud that is made of plastic.
These fans are MSI’s Torx 4.0 fans, which group the blades together (every two blades are connected) to create unprecedented levels of focused air pressure. The fans also make use of MSI’s Zero Frozr technology. This allows for the fans to completely stop when temperatures are low for no-noise operation.
Looking at the card from the side we can see that this is a truly 2-slot graphics card. So we have a relatively small dual-fin stack. There is a stack over the GPU and PCB itself and another that extends past the PCB that makes up the rest of the card. These two fin stacks are connected by heatpipes. On the main side of the card it says “GeForce RTX” and there is a MSI logo, but unfortunately these will not light up with RGB lighting. These is actually no RGB lighting on this card.
Right at the center of the card (end of the PCB) you’ll find your power connector, which is actually a normal 8-pin PCI-Express power connector. This is the first card in the RTX 40 series that we’ve seen use this connector instead of the newer 12VHPWR connector. As we reported last week it seems some manufacturers are using this connector on their lower-end RTX 4070 SKUs that have reference clocks, while they will use the 12VHPWR connector on their higher-end overclocked SKUs.
Flipping the card over we have a full-coverage backplate that says “GeForce RTX” and has the MSI logo on it. There are also openings towards the end of it which allows air to pass through. The backplate has a sort of brushed finish to it, but unfortunately it is not metal, it is Graphene. Graphene provides a light-weight backplate which is stronger and more efficient at heat dissipation than plastic.
Moving on to the connections we have three DisplayPort 1.4a and a single HDMI 2.1. Again, we can see this is a 2-slot card as even the shroud does not go over the expansion slot covers on the card.
