Packaging

The Card

Vanguard is MSI's new GPU lineup and the cards are looking good. The color theme is still metal, with highlights in various shades of gray, but the color theme is a bit darker than Suprim—I like. On the back you get a metal backplate with a large cutout.


Dimensions of the card are 36.0 x 15.0 cm, and it weighs 1937 g.


Installation requires four slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 66 mm.


You probably saw the slot peek out on the photo above, and wondered "maybe I can still fit a card there?" No, I've tried, even a bare card won't fit into the slot. The card is maybe 2 mm too wide.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 2.1b and a HDMI 2.1b.

Standard for all GeForce RTX 50-series Blackwell cards is a new display engine that supports three DisplayPort 2.1b outputs, each capable of UHBR20; and one HDMI 2.1a. Both interfaces support DSC (display stream compression). With DSC enabled, a single DisplayPort on this card can drive 4K 12-bit HDR at 480 Hz; or 8K 12-bit HDR at up to 165 Hz. The RTX 5070 Ti features an updated media acceleration engine with support for 4:2:2 video formats, AV1 UHQ, and MV-HEVC. There are two independent NVENC and NVDEC units.


The card uses a single 16-pin connector, which allows a maximum power draw of 600 W, but the board power limit is set much lower of course.


Near the IO shield is the dual BIOS switch, which lets you toggle between the default Quiet BIOS and a Performance BIOS, which runs the fans at higher speed.


MSI has installed an RGB lighting zone on the "MSI" logo, near the fans and on the right side of the card on the second logo badge.

Teardown

The heatsink uses eight heatpipes and a large vapor-chamber baseplate. It provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry, too.


The backplate protects the card against damage during installation and handling.