MSI GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Suprim X Review

Name: MSI GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Suprim X
Brand: MSI

W1zzard

on Jun 9th, 2021,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: MSI

(9 Comments) »

Introduction

The MSI GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Suprim X is the company's top custom-design graphics card based on the swanky new RTX 3070 Ti high-end graphics card by NVIDIA. The Suprim series represents MSI's best efforts in the areas of product design, factory-overclocked speeds, cooling performance, and more. NVIDIA debuted the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti to augment its RTX 30-series "Ampere" graphics card family, particularly as it faced unexpected competition from rival AMD in the high-end with the Radeon RX 6000 series "Big Navi" graphics cards. The RTX 3070 Ti is designed to fill a performance gap between the the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080, letting NVIDIA better compete with the RX 6700 XT and RX 6800, which posed stiff competition to the RTX 3070. Cards from this segment are expected to offer maxed-out gaming at 1440p with raytracing enabled, and also retain the ability to play at 4K UHD with reasonably good settings.

The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is based on the same GA104 silicon as the RTX 3070, but NVIDIA made two major design changes—first, it has maxed out the GA104, enabling all 6,144 CUDA cores as opposed to 5,888 on the RTX 3070; and second, it is using faster 19 Gbps GDDR6X memory in place of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory. The memory sub-system alone sees a significant 35% uplift in bandwidth. The memory size is still 8 GB.

The GeForce "Ampere" graphics architecture debuts the second-generation of NVIDIA's path-breaking RTX real-time raytracing technology that combines raytraced effects, such as reflections, shadows, lighting, and global-illumination, with conventional raster 3D graphics to increase realism. "Ampere" combines second-generation RT cores with third-generation Tensor cores that accelerate AI, and faster "Ampere" CUDA cores.

The MSI RTX 3070 Ti Suprim X is an attempt by MSI to match NVIDIA's Founders Edition cards in terms of aesthetics. A premium-looking, brushed metal cooler shroud greets you, with its trio of TorX 4.0 fans, and a dense aluminium fin-stack heatsink. MSI has given the RTX 3070 Ti its top factory-overclock at 1860 MHz compared to the 1770 MHz reference. In this review, we take the card out for a spin to show you whether MSI has aced a better-looking and better-performing card than the NVIDIA Founders Edition.

GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Cores	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
RX 5700 XT	$370	2560	64	1605 MHz	1755 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070	$340	2304	64	1410 MHz	1620 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060	$900	3584	48	1320 MHz	1777 MHz	1875 MHz	GA106	13250M	12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2070 Super	$450	2560	64	1605 MHz	1770 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Radeon VII	$680	3840	64	1400 MHz	1800 MHz	1000 MHz	Vega 20	13230M	16 GB, HBM2, 4096-bit
RTX 2080	$600	2944	64	1515 MHz	1710 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Super	$690	3072	64	1650 MHz	1815 MHz	1940 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060 Ti	$1300	4864	80	1410 MHz	1665 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6700 XT	$1000	2560	64	2424 MHz	2581 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 22	17200M	12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2080 Ti	$1400	4352	88	1350 MHz	1545 MHz	1750 MHz	TU102	18600M	11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit
RTX 3070	$1300	5888	96	1500 MHz	1725 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3070 Ti	$1300 MSRP: $600	6144	96	1575 MHz	1770 MHz	1188 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
MSI RTX 3070 Ti Suprim X	$1350	6144	96	1575 MHz	1860 MHz	1188 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RX 6800	$1400	3840	96	1815 MHz	2105 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800 XT	$1700	4608	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3080	$1500	8704	96	1440 MHz	1710 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	10 GB, GDDR6X, 320-bit
RTX 3080 Ti	$2200	10240	112	1365 MHz	1665 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	12 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit

Packaging

The Card

The MSI GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Suprim X looks closest to the NVIDIA Founders Edition in terms of quality of design, and attention to detail by its designers. It's easily the largest RTX 3070 Ti card we have with us today, with its imposing brushed metal cooler shroud. The RGB elements are tastefully executed and not in-your-face.

Dimensions of the card are 33.5 x 14.5 cm, and it weighs 1777 g.

Installation requires three slots in your system.

Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and one HDMI 2.1. The DisplayPort 1.4a outputs support Display Stream Compression (DSC) 1.2a, which lets you connect 4K displays at 120 Hz and 8K displays at 60 Hz. Ampere can drive two 8K displays at 60 Hz with just one cable per display.

Ampere is the first GPU to support HDMI 2.1, which increases bandwidth to 48 Gbps to support higher resolutions, like 4K144 and 8K30, with a single cable. With DSC, this goes up to 4K240 and 8K120. NVIDIA's new NVENC/NVDEC video engine is optimized to handle video tasks with minimal CPU load. The highlight here is added support for AV1 decode. Just like on Turing, you may also decode MPEG-2, VC1, VP8, VP9, H.264, and H.265 natively, at up to 8K@12-bit.

The encoder is identical to Turing. It supports H.264, H.265, and lossless at up to 8K@10-bit.

Power is drawn from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Combined with slot power, this configuration supplies up to 375 W.

The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti does not support SLI.

Teardown

The MSI Suprim X is a lot easier to take apart than the Founders Edition card. Simply undo a series of screws and the cooler comes off cleanly. Thermal pads for memory are 2.5 mm thick, and those on the VRM are 2.0 mm thick.

The cooler uses two aluminium fin stacks that are skewered by seven 6-mm-thick aluminium fin stacks, which pull heat through a copper base plate. An eighth flat heat-pipe spreads heat around this area. Additional base plates pull heat from the VRM.

The card comes with a metal reinforcement that counteracts PCB bending over time.

The metal back plate comes with additional thermal pads and participates in the cooling. Thickness of the thermal pads on the back is 4.0 mm.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles, videos or forum posts.