Released as part of MSI's 30-year anniversary celebration, the GTX 1070 Quick Silver does away with the red-and-black color theme dominating the MSI Gaming Series. Instead, a clean silver-and-black color theme is used, which will go well with nearly all colors in a system. In terms of capabilities and performance the card sits between the GTX 1070 Gaming X and GTX 1070 Gaming Z. It has the slightly more powerful thermal solution of the Gaming Z, but comes with the same clocks as the Gaming X. When looking at overall performance, the card is 5% faster than the GTX 1070 reference and roughly 1% slower than the higher-clocked Gaming Z. Compared to the GTX 1080, we see a 15% performance difference; AMD's fastest, the R9 Fury X, is 15% behind the GTX 1070 Quick Silver.

Just like on other MSI cards, the TwinFrozr thermal solution does a fantastic job at keeping the card both cool and quiet. With only 67°C under load, this is the coolest GTX 1070 we have tested so far, and at the same time, it only emits 29 dBA, which matches the quietest GTX 1070s we have tested. Unbelievably quiet given the card's performance, you almost won't hear it when installed in a case and running at full load. MSI has also included the idle fan-off feature we love so much since it provides a perfect noise-free experience during desktop work, Internet browsing, and even light gaming.

Just like on the reference design, power efficiency is amazing, with huge improvements over the "Maxwell" architecture that is already highly efficient in the first place. However, it looks as though MSI traded some efficiency for more performance, which isn't unreasonable. Compared to the reference design, we see about 30 W more power draw in gaming, which translates into around a 15% loss in performance-per-watt. Even though this brings power consumption above GTX 1080 reference levels, I say no big deal as "Pascal" is so efficient the power is well spent, and a power-draw figure of well-below 200 W is still extremely low for this performance class; and the card is nearly silent anyway due to its excellent thermal solution and well-crafted fan profile. Compared to previous MSI 1070s we tested, the board power limit is set a bit higher with 205 W (Gaming X: 185 W, Gaming Z: 195 W). This increase will not only help during overclocking, but also at stock, out of the box, because it lets the NVIDIA Boost technology to boost higher for longer, which translates into some extra performance.

Unlike the reference design, which only uses a single 8-pin power connector for the sake of convenience, the MSI GTX 1070 QuickSilver requires the 8-pin and another 6-pin connector, which seems a bit too optimistic given the board's power limit, our power consumption testing, and the overclocking potential we've seen. I'm sure a single 8-pin, which is specced at up to 225 W (not a hard limit), would have been sufficient for everything people will do with the card. On the other hand, I'm sure there are a significant number of customers who would have avoided this card had it not had the "more powerful" power configuration.

This is the first GTX 1070 with Micron memory I have tested and I have to say that I haven't encountered a single issue with it, which means MSI is using a BIOS with proper Micron memory support. The only way you'd ever notice it is during overclocking, where the Micron chips overclock by about 100 MHz less than chips from Samsung, which translates into roughly 1% performance - I am not sure whether that is worth worrying about.

Price-wise, the MSI GTX 1070 QuickSilver clocks in at $425, which is a very reasonable price for an almost perfect GTX 1070. However, MSI's GTX 1070 Gaming X is currently sold at $400 and doesn't do significantly worse in any metric, certainly not enough to warrant a $25 difference; on the other hand, 25 bucks is just a 6% price increase, so the difference won't really matter much.