Introduction

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2070 Super launched not long ago, in July this year. The new SKU was released to counter AMD's Radeon RX 5700-series "Navi" graphics cards, which ended up faster than the plain GeForce RTX 2070. Unlike the RTX 2070, the RTX 2070 Super is based on the 13.6 billion-transistor "TU104" silicon since NVIDIA had maxed out the "TU106" with the original RTX 2070. The "TU104" is at the heart of the much pricier RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Super graphics cards.

The most interesting aspect about the RTX 2070 Super is that it's based on the 13.6 billion-transistor "TU104" silicon since NVIDIA had maxed out the "TU106" with the original RTX 2070. The "TU104" is at the heart of the much pricier RTX 2080 and upcoming RTX 2080 Super graphics cards. What this means to consumers is that most custom-design add-in card (AIC) partners would rather reuse their existing RTX 2080 board designs with a little cost-cutting on the VRM instead of spending money on developing and validating new PCBs. Another benefit is partners using heavy cooling solutions that were originally designed to handle the much hotter RTX 2080, and perhaps even the RTX 2080 Ti.




NVIDIA carved the RTX 2070 Super out of the "TU104" silicon by disabling an entire GPC worth of CUDA cores, leaving the chip with 2,560 out of its 3,072 CUDA cores enabled, besides 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, 320 Tensor cores, and 40 RT cores. The memory subsystem is untouched. 8 GB of memory ticks at 14 Gbps and sits across a 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, churning out 448 GB/s of memory bandwidth. GPU clock speeds are increased, too, with up to 1770 MHz GPU Boost frequency compared to 1620 MHz on the original RTX 2070. Another neat little perk of being based on the "TU104" silicon is NVLink support, which enables 2-way SLI.

In this review, we have with us the MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Super Gaming Z, which is MSI's third card in the RTX 2070 Super "Gaming" Series. Visually, the card is identical to the RTX 2070 Super Gaming X Trio we reviewed here). Unlike the Gaming X, the Gaming Z uses a large triple-fan thermal solution and comes with higher memory clock out of the box. It seems NVIDIA enabled out-of-the-box memory overclocking for RTX 2070 Super only recently because EVGA announced a similar product not long ago. The cornerstone for this improvement are 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory chips from Samsung, which are able to handle the new clock speeds. The card ships with a factory overclock of 1815 MHz GPU Boost (15 MHz higher than Gaming X & Gaming X Trio, 45 MHz higher than NVIDIA Founders Edition). Memory ticks at 1938 MHz, 188 MHz higher than the Founders Edition. MSI doesn't have final pricing yet, but we expect the card to retail a bit above the RTX 2070 Super Gaming X Trio, so at around $570.