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After the launch of Nvidia's RTX 3070 Founders Edition earlier this week, today we take a look at our first custom model. The MSI RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio has an MSRP of £539.99 here in the UK and comes with an increased power limit compared to Nvidia's reference design, alongside a factory overclocked core and a simply huge cooler. We put this card through its paces and see how it compares to Nvidia's dinky Founders Edition.
At first glance, you would be forgiven for thinking this is actually one of MSI's RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 designs. That's because the RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio is undboutedly a huge card, and it appears to be re-using the same shroud design as its bigger brothers, though the internal heatsink and cooler layout is a little different.
While this graphics card may not have the same diminutive appearance as the Founders Edition then, we would hope the significantly larger cooler will do a better job at keeping the GPU cool, while also reducing noise levels. We put that hypothesis to the test today.
| GPU | RTX 3090 | RTX 3080 | RTX 3070 | RTX 2080 Ti (FE) | RTX 2080 SUPER |
| SMs | 82 | 68 | 46 | 68 | 48 |
| CUDA Cores | 10496 | 8704 | 5888 | 4352 | 3072 |
| Tensor Cores | 328 | 272 | 184 | 544 | 384 |
| RT Cores | 82 | 68 | 46 | 68 | 48 |
| Texture Units | 328 | 272 | 184 | 272 | 192 |
| ROPs | 112 | 96 | 96 | 88 | 64 |
| GPU Boost Clock | 1695 MHz | 1710 MHz | 1725 MHz | 1635 MHz | 1815 MHz |
| Memory Data Rate | 19.5 Gbps | 19 Gbps | 14 Gbps | 14 Gbps | 15.5 Gbps |
| Total Video Memory | 24GB GDDR6X | 10GB GDDR6X | 8GB GDDR6 | 11GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 |
| Memory Interface | 384-bit | 320-bit | 256-bit | 352-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 936 GB/Sec | 760 GB/Sec | 448 GB/Sec | 616 GB/sec | 496.1 GB/sec |
| TGP | 350W | 320W | 220W | 260W | 250W |
To recap its core spec, unlike its more expensive RTX 30-series brethren, the RTX 3070 uses Nvidia’s GA104 GPU, instead of GA102. This implementation of GA104 incorporates 46 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), and thanks to Ampere’s new SM structure with its two FP32 datapaths, each SM houses 128 CUDA cores, giving RTX 3070 a total of 5888.
Ampere also places one RT core, and four Tensor cores, in each SM, giving a total of 46 RT cores and 184 Tensor cores. This is accompanied by 184 texture units, and 96 ROPs which are now housed directly within each graphics processing cluster (GPC), with 16 ROPs per GPC, and 6 GPCs in total for RTX 3070.
Clock speed is slightly higher than the RTX 3080. Where the RTX 3070 Founders Edition has a reference clock of 1725MHz, MSI has pushed this to 1830MHz boost. The power limit has also increased from 220W up to 240W.
Lastly, for the memory, RTX 3070 has ditched GDDR6X and we are back to 8GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 memory, operating over a 256-bit bus, for total memory bandwidth of 448 GB/Sec.
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