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So, with Nvidia's GTX 1070 Ti now upon us, what can be said about it?
For starters, this review has analysed the MSI GTX 1070 Ti Gaming 8G – MSI's top-of-the-line GTX 1070 Ti card. Looking at the design of the card, MSI has kept its black and red colour scheme which is a staple of the ‘Gaming' family of products. Unfortunately, if you want their best 1070 Ti but don't like the colour scheme, you are out of luck. It's red and black, or nothing.
The Gaming 8G is very well designed in terms of its cooling ability and noise levels – we saw tremendous results across the board there. It is also important to note that the Gaming 8G is ‘just' a dual-slot card, not a two-and-a-half slot card which are becoming more and more common.
Gaming performance is definitely the most important aspect to the 1070 Ti, as being so close to the GTX 1080 in terms of core specification, there was potential for the card to deliver similar frame rates to the 1080 but at a lower cost. In practice, the lack of factory overclocking does hurt the MSI card – as it would for any aftermarket partner card – we saw results that were certainly better than GTX 1070, but still some ways off the performance of a GTX 1080.
When we factor in overclocking, though, with +180MHz to the GPU core and +625MHz to the memory, the Gaming 8G quickly closed the gap until the differences were essentially less than 1 FPS. We achieved this result by running the card's fans at 100%, so there is obviously the extra noise to factor in, but with the right pricing and a decent overclock, the 1070 Ti could prove to be an attractive purchase.
That being said, pricing just isn't right at the minute. I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket so to speak, and completely damn the GTX 1070 Ti, but the aftermarket cards' pricing definitely needs adjusting. This MSI Gaming 8G currently retails for £488.99 in the UK, but GTX 1080s can be found for the same money – take this Gigabyte Windforce3 card as an example.
So, with all that said, the MSI GTX 1070 Ti Gaming 8G is undoubtedly an excellent aftermarket card – it is cool, quiet and overclocks to reference clocked GTX 1080 levels. However, the pricing is not yet at a point where the GTX 1070 Ti makes any sense. If pricing dropped to around the £440-£450 mark, safely in between the 1070 and 1080, then I firmly believe the card has its place in the market. As for now, if you're looking at spending £480-500 on a graphics card, the GTX 1080 is still the way to go.
You can buy the MSI Gaming 8G from Scan HERE.
Pros
- Runs cool.
- Very quiet.
- Overclocks to around GTX 1080 levels of performance.
- Dual-slot design.
- Fans stop spinning when GPU core is less than 60C.
Cons
- Pricing is a big concern – currently the Gaming 8G is not worth it over a GTX 1080 card.
- Black and red colour scheme won't work for everybody.
- Palit Super JetStream is faster out of the box.
KitGuru says: There is great potential for GTX 1070 Ti – this MSI card is cool, quiet and a good overclocker. However, pricing needs to drop before the 1070 Ti makes any sense over GTX 1080.
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