A week ago, MSI introduced its lineup of custom GeForce RTX 5070 graphics card models—headlined by their premium VANGUARD option, with a product stack going down to a budget friendly INSPIRE 3X offering. Since then, the Taiwanese manufacturer has added another entry to its NVIDIA "Blackwell" GB205 GPU-based family. As observed by VideoCardz, MSI is overpopulating its GeForce RTX 5070 stack with two more models. The SHADOW 2X OC and SHADOW 2X (non-OC) have—very recently—popped up on the company's website, with absolutely zero PR fanfare. The triple-fan SHADOW 3X designs received a similar treatment last month—brand-new stealth-black GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti custom designs seemingly appeared overnight.

As befits the nomenclature, MSI's SHADOW 2X design sports a TORX 5.0 dual-fan cooling solution. As covered by TechPowerUp's news section in the past, the SHADOW series shares similarities with VENTUS—both families serve as "baseline MSRP" conformant products, due to a minimalistic aesthetic and barebones feature set (i.e. focused on the essentials). MSI marketing blurb describes SHADOW as: "a performance-focused design that delivers the gaming experience players want, making it the ideal choice when upgrading or building a gaming rig." The company has courted controversy in recent times; VideoCardz and other media outlets have leveled plenty of criticism throughout February and March—the lack of "MSRP" models and reported price hiking at launch became major sticking points. Industry watchdogs believe that the freshly unveiled SHADOW 2X models will be in short supply for the foreseeable future.