Note: At the time of this publication, it was discovered by NVIDIA over the weekend that this particular model, the MSI Ventus 3X GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super is suffering from an issue whereby its overall performance is approximately 5% below what the GPU brand says should be its optimal performance. NVIDIA has already issued reviewers a VBIOS update for it, so I will retest the card with a fix and update this review with the new findings a little later down the road.
Original article below:
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super is the second of the new RTX 40 Super series cards to come out and in keeping with its own trend, the GPU brand has said that there will not be a Founders Edition version of the GPU. Instead, it will be leaving it in the hands of its AIB partners and to that end, the model of the card that we have comes in the form of the MSI Ventus 3X.
Specifications
Design
As it has been with MSI’s Ventus lineup, the RTX 4070 Ti Super model in my lab sports a mildly wild look that itself has been recycled from the non-Super RTX 4070 Ti. In fact, they both look utterly identical but then again, the card is technically an inter-generational upgrade and it would a fool’s errand to assume that MSI would design a whole new shroud or cooling solution for the card.
To that end, you get the same triple-fan configuration, made from MSI’s TORX Fan 4.0, a large copper baseplate that sits directly on top of the GPU, and a stylised backplate, filled with all the angular cuts that your inner geek desires. As for the RTX 4070 Ti Super itself, the GPU is, as listed in the specs sheet above, an AD103 GPU and not the AD104 architecture that the non-Super rocks. Oh, and it’s also got an additional 4GB of GDDR6X of graphics memory and if you think about it, those last two factors kind of make it a “baby” RTX 4080.
Beyond that, you get the revamped 12VHPWR power PCIe Gen5 power connector and accompanying adapter, the same number of DisplayPort and HDMI ports, and as an extra added bonus, this Ventus 3X RTX 4070 Ti Super even comes with its own anti-sagging bracket. Why MSI thought this was necessary is a little puzzling, though, given that it isn’t the heaviest card I’ve ever tested or held but hey, prevention is always better than the cure.
Testbench
There isn’t a whole lot to say in this section, except perhaps to reiterate the note and disclaimer that I put at the top of this review: an issue with the VBIOS of this card was detected by NVIDIA at the end of last week, causing the Ventus 3X RTX 4070 Ti Super models, in particular, to perform slightly worse than its projected numbers. Specifically, it’s a plus-minus between 5% and 8%.
NVIDIA has since provided us with the VBIOS update that resolves the issue but given how short notice the discovery was and seeing how all the initial testing was already completed, I have decided to post the results pre-VBIOS update for now. I’ll update this review with the new results sometime later, as that will require me to redo all the benchmarks, both synthetic and real-world.
Benchmarks, Temperatures, And Power Consumption
Again, while the title of this review may allude to me having called this RTX 4070 Ti Super a “baby” RTX 4080, and the fact that the results here will very clearly need to be revisited, post-BIOS update, the performance of the Ventus 3X RTX 4070 Ti Super is a mixed bag.
It’s nice to see all that extra 4GB of GDDR6X memory and CUDA cores helping the RTX 4070 Ti Super pull ahead of its non-Super sibling but, at the risk of repeating myself, I am pretty certain that VBIOS update for the card will undoubtedly allow it to eke a little more performance out of it.
Moving into the realm of gaming, you start to see where the VBIOS issue begins to rear its ugly head, with the RTX 4070 Ti Super not even able to pull ahead of its own non-Super sibling across the board. Honestly, I’m not expecting it to pull ahead by a huge margin but at the very least, that lead should be a constant, not a hit-or-miss.
Temperatures and power consumption are, surprisingly, consistent with other RTX 40 Series GPUs that I have tested thus far, meaning that at load, the RTX 4070 Ti Super peaks at 68°C on average. But, as always, this is achieved in a controlled environment with the lab kept at a cool 20°C at all times during testing.
Conclusion
At this stage, I won’t be able to recommend the MSI Ventus 3X GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super simply because the results shown here are, once again, before the VBIOS update was applied to it. I don’t think the card should be doing worse than the non-Super variant of it, especially when it comes to gaming.
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