While MSI releasing the RTX 2070 Super Gaming X now seems a bit late, especially considering the Gaming X Trio has been available since launch day, it actually makes sense if you take a closer look at their product stack. The Gaming X Trio with its large triple-fan cooler, extra-long 33 cm design, and Monolith systems GPU voltage controller is not exactly cheap to build. With supply levels normalizing, competition is heating up in this market segment, which means prices are trickling down, and MSI might not be able to keep up, which is why I think they came up with the dual-fan RTX 2070 Super Gaming X covered in this review. It's a bit more economical to build, but doesn't compromise on much and will fit all cases due to its shorter length. Compatibility is probably also the reason why MSI is using a 6-pin and 8-pin power input configuration, instead of dual 8-pins like on the Trio, but more on that later.

MSI has overclocked their RTX 2070 Gaming X by +30 MHz rated boost, to 1800 MHz. This nets the card a performance gain of 3% over the RTX 2070 Super Founders Edition, which is not a whole lot. The underlying reason is that MSI has not increased the board power limit, which we'll discuss later in the conclusion. The much more expensive RTX 2080 is 4% faster. With a 6% lead, the Gaming X is faster than AMD's Radeon VII flagship, too, and the aging GTX 1080 Ti is 5% behind. AMD released the Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 XT this summer—the Gaming X is 15% faster. With those performance numbers, we can easily recommend the card for gaming at 1440p.

The large triple-slot thermal solution MSI uses is slightly weaker than the one on the Gaming X Trio, and seems identical to the cooler of the RTX 2070 Gaming Z. Still, thermal performance is good. Temperatures are improved slightly over the Founders Edition and noise levels are much better. With only 31 dBA at full load, the MSI RTX 2070 Super Gaming X is one of the quietest RTX 2070 Super graphics card we have ever reviewed. Its noise levels do get beaten by 2–3 dBA by the Gaming X Trio and the ASUS STRIX in "quiet" mode, though, which is significant, but not by enough to worry about unless noise is of the utmost importance to you. As expected, MSI's card also includes the highly popular idle-fan-stop feature, which completely shuts off the card's fans during idle, desktop work, and light gaming. What I would also like to praise MSI for is that they don't hide fan-stop and low noise levels behind a dual-BIOS feature—their card's noise levels are well balanced right out of the box.

Unfortunately, MSI did not increase the board power limit on Gaming X. It sits at the exact same 215 W as the Founders Edition. This of course costs the overclock out the box potential performance, but helps keep heat output in check, so the cooler can cope more easily. What's a bit surprising though is that the maximum manual adjustment power limit is lower than on the Founders Edition (240 W vs. 260 W). We observed the same in our initial Gaming X Trio review, so it seems like it's not a bug and the product is designed that way. As mentioned before, MSI decided to replace the 8+8 power input configuration with a 6+8 configuration, which is completely reasonable. The card's power limit is way too low to hit the 300 W limit 6+8 can provide, so there's no point in having inputs that could handle 375 W. Actually, I think going for 6+8 makes a lot of sense in this case because it improves PSU compatibility.

The power limiter does complicate overclocking a bit because you can no longer dial in the exact clocks you want to overclock to. Still, we managed to gain another 7% in real-life performance from OC. It would have been nice to see a memory overclock out of the box, which the chips can definitely take as our manual overclocking results show.

Unlike AMD's Radeon RX 5700 XT, the NVIDIA RTX Super lineup comes with support for raytracing hardware acceleration. While that's not the most important feature to have right now, it looks like game developers are picking up on it, and many upcoming titles have been announced to feature raytracing, so the future might be bright for RTX.

According to MSI, we should expect pricing around $510 for the MSI RTX 2070 Super Gaming X, which is only a $10 price increase over the NVIDIA Founders Edition, making this card a no-brainer. For very little extra money you get idle-fan-stop, a better cooler, an overclock out of the box, and adjustable RGB lighting. Personally, I still see a market for the Gaming X Trio, which is currently listed for around $540. People who value low noise more than anything else are probably willing to spend that extra money for the reduced noise levels.