MSI RTX 2070 Armor 8G Review

Rating: 8.0.

For our launch day coverage of the RTX 2070, we assessed the factory overclocked Gaming Z model from MSI. It proved to be a very competent card, but priced at over £600 it faces stiff competition from the GTX 1080 Ti. The MSI RTX 2070 Armor 8G we are looking at today, however, costs £459 – making it MSI's entry level RTX 2070 card. That means it doesn't have much in the way of features, but if you are just interested in bang-for-buck, could this be the card to get?

In the weeks that followed the launch of Nvidia's RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti cards, a lot was made about the pricing of the cards – to this day, there are very few aftermarket models available that cost less than the Founders Edition cards. With the 2070, it seems Nvidia has directed its partners to have more entry-level models available at the 2070's base MSRP (£459), and the MSI RTX 2070 Armor 8G is one such card.

That means it does not come factory overclocked, while its cooler is also quite basic. As we will see later in the review, MSI is also re-using the PCB design from its RTX 2070 Gaming Z with the Armor 8G to try and keep costs as low as possible. So while it's certainly not a card to go for if you want plenty of extra features, can the raw performance of the RTX 2070 make this card worth buying?

Unlike the Founders Edition RTX 2070, and MSI's own Gaming Z model, the Armor 8G does not ship with a factory overclock. Instead, it is clocked at reference speeds, meaning a rated 1620MHz boost clock – although we can still expect it to exceed this frequency in operation thanks to GPU Boost.

Other than that, the Armor 8G has identical specs to the RTX 2070 Gaming Z, with the same GDDR6 memory clock and thus 448 GB/s memory bandwidth. It will be interesting to look at overclocking later in the review to see how much ground the Armor 8G can regain when manually tuned to its limit.

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