When Nvidia released its RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition earlier this month, it was only a matter of time before we got our hands on versions from the biggest brands in the graphics card business. The MSI RTX 3070 Ti Suprim X 8G is the first up. It’s part of MSI’s top-of-the-line GPU series and offers increased clock speeds, a massive cooler, and more power for your overclocking demands. Final pricing isn’t in yet, but a representative from MSI tells us to expect $100-$150 over MSRP, placing it at or above $699 to $749. Pricey, but does it have the performance to match?
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The MSI Suprim line-up is the company’s current best-of-the-best and it has the looks to match. Visually, it’s near-identical to the RTX 3080 Ti version I reviewed here. If you’ve never seen a Surpim card, they’re big boys, fully 13.2 inches long and three slots wide. If you have a compact PC or even a mid-tower with fans in the front, you’ll want to measure to make sure it will fit. The card is also just under four pounds in weight, so if you’re mounting horizontally, you’ll want to support it in some way to prevent GPU sad and strain on your PCIe slot. Thankfully, MSI includes an adjustable support that stands on the bottom of your case and uses an adjustable shelf to prop up the GPU. I find this easier to manage than the brackets that need to screw into the back of the case but it will require some extra space to use.
With the lighting off, the overall look is industrial-chic. It makes heavy use of brushed metal and RGB. On the front, its trio of Torx 4.0 fans are shrouded with an aluminum front panel in light and dark tones for contrast. The shroud emphasizes hard angles which accentuates the curved fan blades with their eye-catching dragon logos at the center. The middle fan is flanked by a pair of RGB strips in the shape of arrows. Around the back, the Suprim X has a thick metal backplate to dissipate heat that’s also in two tones.
Turn the lighting on and anything minimal about the Suprim X goes out the window. The card is an RGB showcase with LEDs on the front, back, and side. Mounting your GPU vertically is the trend in modern PC building but here it feels like that would be a disservice, at least if you’re a fan of RGB. In addition to the two strips surrounding the middle fan, a long, bright strip and illuminated logo grace the side shining in their rainbow glory. On the back, a transparent dragon badge shines toward the top of your case. Each of these are customizable using MSI’s Mystic Light software if rainbows aren’t your thing. Taken as a whole package, I find this to be one of the best-looking GPUs on the market today.
Under the hood, the core of the GPU is the same as the Founders Edition. We still have 6144 CUDA cores and 8GB of GDDR6X memory, but it comes overclocked out of the box with a rated boost speed of 1860 MHz (or 1875 MHz with the software-enabled Extreme Mode). In practice, these rated speeds don’t mean a lot thanks to GPU Boost but act as a soft guarantee of better baseline performance. Under load, my sample peaked at 1995 MHz, 45 MHz higher than my peak using the Founders Edition. This was also true of my typical clock speed while gaming which was 1965 MHz which, exactly 45 MHz higher than the FE.
The biggest selling point of the Suprim X isn’t these stock speeds, however, it’s the overclocking potential provided by the additional power and cooling capacity. Like the RTX 3080 Ti Surpim X 12G, it uses MSI’s TriFrozr 2S cooling system. This combines improved Torx 4.0 fans with a big wave-finned heatsink to push more air with less noise, keeping the 3070 Ti chilly even under load. There are two BIOS modes selectable with a switch on the back of the card for Gaming or Silent Modes but even in Gaming Mode, the card manages to stay both quieter and colder than the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition. In my testing, the card peaked at 68C and hung closer to 65C in games while using the default fan curve, a 14-degree improvement from the original. There’s also Zero Frozr mode that keeps the fans from spinning when the card is at a low temperature, such as normal browsing.
That big cooler will be necessary as you start ramping up clock speeds with a custom overclock. MSI has raised the power requirements to 310-watts, twenty more than the original, and outfitted the card with premium power regulation components to enhance its stability. Removing the power limits and turning the dial on clock speeds inevitably raises temperatures but Suprim X offers enough power and thermal headroom that you’ll be able to push its silicon hard without worrying about damaging your chip.
Unchanged from the Founders Edition are outputs and core Ampere features. In total, you’ll be able to run up to four monitors with a maximum resolution of 7680x4320 (8K). The card features three DisplayPort 1.4 connections and one HDMI 2.1 output for the latest and greatest in gaming monitors and televisions. With these, you’ll be able to experience DLSS, Nvidia’s proprietary performance-enhancing upscaling technology, Nvidia Reflex to reduce input latency and add responsiveness in shooters, and Nvidia Broadcast for streamers, as well as Nvidia Studio for content creators. For entertainment, the card supports AV1 encoding and the Nvidia encoder for creating your own video content.
Test system: Z390 Asus ROG Maximus XI Extreme Motherboard, Intel Core i9-9900K CPU (stock), Corsair H115i PRO RGB 280mm AIO CPU Cooler, 32GB Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro DDR4-3200, 1TB Samsung EVO Plus NVMe SSD, Corsair HX1200 1200-watt power supply.
With that out of the way, it’s time to look at how the card stacks up. Remember, the original RTX 3070 Ti (reviewed here) offered only marginal benefits over the standard RTX 3070 and left a sizable gap between it and the RTX 3080. The MSI Suprim X 8G, then, has something to prove to warrant an asking price that’s on par or potentially higher than the RTX 3080 Founders Edition, scarce though it may be.
For this testing, I included the Suprim X, as well as the Founders Editions for the RTX 3080, 3070 Ti, and 3070. From Team Red, I included the Radeon RX 6800 XT (MSRP: $649) and RX 6800 (MSRP: $579). All games tested are at Ultra settings unless otherwise noted. Ray tracing and DLSS are enabled wherever possible.
Beginning with synthetics, I ran the Suprim X and a selection of competitor cards through 3DMark’s Fire Strike Ultra and Unigine’s Heaven benchmark. The clear winner in these tests was the Radeon RX 6800 XT, which dominated the charts, but even the RX 6800 managed a sizable lead in Fire Strike. The Suprim X did outperform the Founders Edition in both tests, and slipped ahead of the RX 6800 in Heaven. The RTX 3080 FE held a big lead over the Suprim in each.
Turning to ray tracing performance, I used three tests to benchmark the cards. From 3DMark, I ran Port Royal and the ray tracing performance test. Next, I ran the Boundary game engine benchmark with DLSS set to Ultra. Obviously, that gives Nvidia’s cards a leg up on the Radeons but hopefully that will change with the upcoming release of FidelityFX Super Resolution.
In Port Royal, the MSI Suprim X handily topped the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition and Radeon RX 6800 but fell short of the RX 6800 XT and RTX 3080 Founders Edition. In both Boundary and the 3DMark ray tracing test, it came in second but was only marginally faster than the 3070 Ti FE.
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To test performance in actual games, I ran each card through our test suite of five games at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions. Performance will, of course, depend on your own titles and settings but in our tests the card averaged 3% faster than the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition at 1080p, 5% faster at 1440p, and 4% faster at 4K. Against the RTX 3080, it was expectedly slower and progressively with each resolution jump. At 1080p, it was 13% behind the 3080, at 1440p it was 15% behind, and at 4K it was 16% behind.
These are marginal improvements from the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition and to be expected with a top of the line GPU variant. More interesting is how it compares to the major competitors for AMD. With the benefit of DLSS, the card was 12% slower than the RX 6800 XT at 1080p, 8% slower at 1440p, and 1% slower at 4K. Take Metro Exodus and DLSS out of the mix and those shift to 15%, 14%, and 13% respectively. Against the much more affordable RX 6800, DLSS gives the Suprim X a progressive lead over the standard RX 6800 with less than 1% difference at 1080p, 8% better FPS at 1440p, and 15% better at 4K. Drop Metro and DLSS and the Suprim actually loses to the card at 1080p, running 6% slower. At 1440p, it offered minor FPS gains of 1%.
Note that even with these results, the Suprim X 8G is still running faster than the Founders Edition. These questions absolutely perpetuate my issues with the value of the 3070 Ti series in the first place, however.
To get a better eye on performance, I did some expanded testing at 4K. Across ten games, the RTX 3070 Ti Suprim X 8G came in 4% faster than the RTX 3070 Ti FE and 17% slower than the RTX 3080. With the benefit of DLSS, it managed to perform 15% faster than the RX 6800 XT and 34% faster than the RX 6800. In rasterization titles only, the roles shift and the Suprim comes in 12% slower than the RX 6800 XT and only 1% faster than the RX 6800.
[poilib element="poll" parameters="id=a3fb6013-5eb8-4ec0-b922-edccf470da23"]
So what can we take away from this? First, the Suprim X is a marginal improvement on the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition. Percentages aside, the performance gains were typically less than 5 FPS with some outliers that were slightly higher. Second, it’s that the RTX 3070 Ti as a whole (this card and the different versions) really make the Radeon RX 6800 and XT look good. Unless you absolutely need DLSS, these cards offer similar or better performance for less money. Like I remarked in my review of the 3070 Ti Founders Edition, this GPU line is just a poor value that doesn’t offer enough reason to choose it against any of the surrounding cards in our line-up.
That said, while I ranked the 3070 Ti FE as “Okay” in our scoring system, this particular variant does offer some benefits that give it a one-up. The thermal improvements are great, albeit in a much larger package, and the design is custom-tailored for enthusiast overclockers. The improvements out of the box are minor, but present, and this version leaves an open door to push the silicon to its limit and take that extra performance by force. Enthusiast-grade GPUs with overclock-centric design often cost more and customers seriously looking for that style of card expect to pay more, so potential price increase isn’t without precedent. If you’re just looking for a normal gaming GPU, it’s a wiser move to wait until you can find an RTX 3080 Founders Edition, or if you don’t care about DLSS, an RX 6800 or 6800 XT at MSRP.
Final pricing hasn’t been set on the MSI RTX 3070 Ti Suprim X 8G but it is expected to launch at major retailers in late June for approximately $699 to $749.
Continue reading...
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MSI RTX 3070 Ti Suprim X 8G – Design and Features
The MSI Suprim line-up is the company’s current best-of-the-best and it has the looks to match. Visually, it’s near-identical to the RTX 3080 Ti version I reviewed here. If you’ve never seen a Surpim card, they’re big boys, fully 13.2 inches long and three slots wide. If you have a compact PC or even a mid-tower with fans in the front, you’ll want to measure to make sure it will fit. The card is also just under four pounds in weight, so if you’re mounting horizontally, you’ll want to support it in some way to prevent GPU sad and strain on your PCIe slot. Thankfully, MSI includes an adjustable support that stands on the bottom of your case and uses an adjustable shelf to prop up the GPU. I find this easier to manage than the brackets that need to screw into the back of the case but it will require some extra space to use.
With the lighting off, the overall look is industrial-chic. It makes heavy use of brushed metal and RGB. On the front, its trio of Torx 4.0 fans are shrouded with an aluminum front panel in light and dark tones for contrast. The shroud emphasizes hard angles which accentuates the curved fan blades with their eye-catching dragon logos at the center. The middle fan is flanked by a pair of RGB strips in the shape of arrows. Around the back, the Suprim X has a thick metal backplate to dissipate heat that’s also in two tones.
Turn the lighting on and anything minimal about the Suprim X goes out the window. The card is an RGB showcase with LEDs on the front, back, and side. Mounting your GPU vertically is the trend in modern PC building but here it feels like that would be a disservice, at least if you’re a fan of RGB. In addition to the two strips surrounding the middle fan, a long, bright strip and illuminated logo grace the side shining in their rainbow glory. On the back, a transparent dragon badge shines toward the top of your case. Each of these are customizable using MSI’s Mystic Light software if rainbows aren’t your thing. Taken as a whole package, I find this to be one of the best-looking GPUs on the market today.
Under the hood, the core of the GPU is the same as the Founders Edition. We still have 6144 CUDA cores and 8GB of GDDR6X memory, but it comes overclocked out of the box with a rated boost speed of 1860 MHz (or 1875 MHz with the software-enabled Extreme Mode). In practice, these rated speeds don’t mean a lot thanks to GPU Boost but act as a soft guarantee of better baseline performance. Under load, my sample peaked at 1995 MHz, 45 MHz higher than my peak using the Founders Edition. This was also true of my typical clock speed while gaming which was 1965 MHz which, exactly 45 MHz higher than the FE.
The biggest selling point of the Suprim X isn’t these stock speeds, however, it’s the overclocking potential provided by the additional power and cooling capacity. Like the RTX 3080 Ti Surpim X 12G, it uses MSI’s TriFrozr 2S cooling system. This combines improved Torx 4.0 fans with a big wave-finned heatsink to push more air with less noise, keeping the 3070 Ti chilly even under load. There are two BIOS modes selectable with a switch on the back of the card for Gaming or Silent Modes but even in Gaming Mode, the card manages to stay both quieter and colder than the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition. In my testing, the card peaked at 68C and hung closer to 65C in games while using the default fan curve, a 14-degree improvement from the original. There’s also Zero Frozr mode that keeps the fans from spinning when the card is at a low temperature, such as normal browsing.
That big cooler will be necessary as you start ramping up clock speeds with a custom overclock. MSI has raised the power requirements to 310-watts, twenty more than the original, and outfitted the card with premium power regulation components to enhance its stability. Removing the power limits and turning the dial on clock speeds inevitably raises temperatures but Suprim X offers enough power and thermal headroom that you’ll be able to push its silicon hard without worrying about damaging your chip.
Unchanged from the Founders Edition are outputs and core Ampere features. In total, you’ll be able to run up to four monitors with a maximum resolution of 7680x4320 (8K). The card features three DisplayPort 1.4 connections and one HDMI 2.1 output for the latest and greatest in gaming monitors and televisions. With these, you’ll be able to experience DLSS, Nvidia’s proprietary performance-enhancing upscaling technology, Nvidia Reflex to reduce input latency and add responsiveness in shooters, and Nvidia Broadcast for streamers, as well as Nvidia Studio for content creators. For entertainment, the card supports AV1 encoding and the Nvidia encoder for creating your own video content.
MSI RTX 3070 Ti Suprim X 8G – Performance
Test system: Z390 Asus ROG Maximus XI Extreme Motherboard, Intel Core i9-9900K CPU (stock), Corsair H115i PRO RGB 280mm AIO CPU Cooler, 32GB Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro DDR4-3200, 1TB Samsung EVO Plus NVMe SSD, Corsair HX1200 1200-watt power supply.
With that out of the way, it’s time to look at how the card stacks up. Remember, the original RTX 3070 Ti (reviewed here) offered only marginal benefits over the standard RTX 3070 and left a sizable gap between it and the RTX 3080. The MSI Suprim X 8G, then, has something to prove to warrant an asking price that’s on par or potentially higher than the RTX 3080 Founders Edition, scarce though it may be.
For this testing, I included the Suprim X, as well as the Founders Editions for the RTX 3080, 3070 Ti, and 3070. From Team Red, I included the Radeon RX 6800 XT (MSRP: $649) and RX 6800 (MSRP: $579). All games tested are at Ultra settings unless otherwise noted. Ray tracing and DLSS are enabled wherever possible.
Beginning with synthetics, I ran the Suprim X and a selection of competitor cards through 3DMark’s Fire Strike Ultra and Unigine’s Heaven benchmark. The clear winner in these tests was the Radeon RX 6800 XT, which dominated the charts, but even the RX 6800 managed a sizable lead in Fire Strike. The Suprim X did outperform the Founders Edition in both tests, and slipped ahead of the RX 6800 in Heaven. The RTX 3080 FE held a big lead over the Suprim in each.
Turning to ray tracing performance, I used three tests to benchmark the cards. From 3DMark, I ran Port Royal and the ray tracing performance test. Next, I ran the Boundary game engine benchmark with DLSS set to Ultra. Obviously, that gives Nvidia’s cards a leg up on the Radeons but hopefully that will change with the upcoming release of FidelityFX Super Resolution.
In Port Royal, the MSI Suprim X handily topped the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition and Radeon RX 6800 but fell short of the RX 6800 XT and RTX 3080 Founders Edition. In both Boundary and the 3DMark ray tracing test, it came in second but was only marginally faster than the 3070 Ti FE.
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To test performance in actual games, I ran each card through our test suite of five games at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions. Performance will, of course, depend on your own titles and settings but in our tests the card averaged 3% faster than the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition at 1080p, 5% faster at 1440p, and 4% faster at 4K. Against the RTX 3080, it was expectedly slower and progressively with each resolution jump. At 1080p, it was 13% behind the 3080, at 1440p it was 15% behind, and at 4K it was 16% behind.
These are marginal improvements from the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition and to be expected with a top of the line GPU variant. More interesting is how it compares to the major competitors for AMD. With the benefit of DLSS, the card was 12% slower than the RX 6800 XT at 1080p, 8% slower at 1440p, and 1% slower at 4K. Take Metro Exodus and DLSS out of the mix and those shift to 15%, 14%, and 13% respectively. Against the much more affordable RX 6800, DLSS gives the Suprim X a progressive lead over the standard RX 6800 with less than 1% difference at 1080p, 8% better FPS at 1440p, and 15% better at 4K. Drop Metro and DLSS and the Suprim actually loses to the card at 1080p, running 6% slower. At 1440p, it offered minor FPS gains of 1%.
Note that even with these results, the Suprim X 8G is still running faster than the Founders Edition. These questions absolutely perpetuate my issues with the value of the 3070 Ti series in the first place, however.
To get a better eye on performance, I did some expanded testing at 4K. Across ten games, the RTX 3070 Ti Suprim X 8G came in 4% faster than the RTX 3070 Ti FE and 17% slower than the RTX 3080. With the benefit of DLSS, it managed to perform 15% faster than the RX 6800 XT and 34% faster than the RX 6800. In rasterization titles only, the roles shift and the Suprim comes in 12% slower than the RX 6800 XT and only 1% faster than the RX 6800.
[poilib element="poll" parameters="id=a3fb6013-5eb8-4ec0-b922-edccf470da23"]
So what can we take away from this? First, the Suprim X is a marginal improvement on the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition. Percentages aside, the performance gains were typically less than 5 FPS with some outliers that were slightly higher. Second, it’s that the RTX 3070 Ti as a whole (this card and the different versions) really make the Radeon RX 6800 and XT look good. Unless you absolutely need DLSS, these cards offer similar or better performance for less money. Like I remarked in my review of the 3070 Ti Founders Edition, this GPU line is just a poor value that doesn’t offer enough reason to choose it against any of the surrounding cards in our line-up.
That said, while I ranked the 3070 Ti FE as “Okay” in our scoring system, this particular variant does offer some benefits that give it a one-up. The thermal improvements are great, albeit in a much larger package, and the design is custom-tailored for enthusiast overclockers. The improvements out of the box are minor, but present, and this version leaves an open door to push the silicon to its limit and take that extra performance by force. Enthusiast-grade GPUs with overclock-centric design often cost more and customers seriously looking for that style of card expect to pay more, so potential price increase isn’t without precedent. If you’re just looking for a normal gaming GPU, it’s a wiser move to wait until you can find an RTX 3080 Founders Edition, or if you don’t care about DLSS, an RX 6800 or 6800 XT at MSRP.
MSI RTX 3070 Ti Suprim X 8G – Purchasing Guide
Final pricing hasn’t been set on the MSI RTX 3070 Ti Suprim X 8G but it is expected to launch at major retailers in late June for approximately $699 to $749.
Continue reading...