MSI’s GeForce RTX 2070 Gaming Z graphics card is their top tier 2070 option in their
lineup at the moment, so let’s check it out and find out what you get for the extra
money. I’ll be testing gaming at 4K, 1440p, and 1080p, as well as overclocking, cooling
and of course ray tracing to show you how it performs.
Let’s start by taking a look at the card. Overall it’s got a black and gunmetal grey
look, so pretty colour neutral and should fit in well with most builds. There are two
double ball bearing fans on the front, metal backplate with a nice brushed finish and MSI
logo on the back, and 8 and 6 pin power connectors on top. It’s worth noting the absence of
NVlink here too, as the 2070 does not support SLI.
There’s RGB lighting on the front of the card, but as I can’t mount it vertically
it’s a little hard to show on camera. There’s also some RGB lighting on the top which shines
through the MSI logo, and the lighting can be controlled using MSI’s Mystic Light Sync
software. There are around 15 different effects available, or you can turn them off if you
prefer.
For the I/O there’s three DisplayPort 1.4 outputs, a single HDMI 2.0b output, and one
USB Type-C port.
The card isn’t too big, at 307mm by 155mm by 50mm it should fit in most cases, and mine
weighed around 1.45kg.
Here are the specs of this particular 2070 card, the boost clock is quite high, 210MHz
higher than the reference spec and 90MHz higher than MSI’s 2070 Armor OC card that I recently
reviewed, but we’ll see how much further we can push it with manual overclocking later.
Like other RTX cards the 2070 also makes use of GDDR6 memory, and there’s 8GB available
here.
The system that I’m testing with has an AMD Ryzen 2700X CPU in an MSI X470 Gaming
Pro Carbon motherboard running at stock speeds, along with 16GB of T-Force Night Hawk CL16
memory running at DDR4-3200 in dual channel. Check the links in the description for details
on all of the components as well as for up to date pricing.
First up let’s check out Battlefield 5, a game that actually supports Nvidia’s new
ray tracing, one of the key selling points of these RTX cards. For comparison I’ve
also got results with RTX on and off, and testing was done in campaign mode rather than
multiplayer, as it’s easier to reproduce.
Starting at 1080p I’ve got the RTX on results in green, and we can see that the average
frame rates are less than half as much compared to running with RTX disabled in blue and purple.
RTX was dropping the performance noticeably, however despite this it was still very playable
at medium and low settings, but to me I found ultra without RTX to look nicer than these
lower settings with RTX. At 1440p with RTX on it was still playable at the lower setting
levels, with low settings still able to average above 60 FPS with the 1% low not too far behind
the average. Meanwhile with RTX off the game was still playing fairly smoothly comparatively
at ultra settings. 4K with RTX on is a write off with the 2070 in this game, but still
playable without RTX at the lower levels, granted it really depends on what frame rates
you’re targeting, I can happily play with 60 FPS in this game but I’m sure others
would want higher.
For the rest of the games I’ve only tested maximum settings at 1080p, 1440p and 4K, rather
than at every single setting level like I usually do. Let me know what you prefer, it
takes significantly more time to test all setting levels at three resolutions, this
way I can include more games in the time I’ve got available.
Fortnite was tested using the replay feature, at 1080p even with epic settings the frame
rates were very high, and then still above 100 FPS with 1440p. 4K was playable, but ideally
you’d probably want a higher frame rate than this, which of course could also be improved
by lowering the settings.
Overwatch was tested by completing the same test run through the practice range, and we’re
seeing very high frame rates at 1080p and even 1440p despite the settings maxed out
on epic, with above 200 FPS average for both. Even 4K was still playing smoothly, at over
100 FPS on average.
CSGO was tested using the Ulletical benchmark, and was another game that saw very high frame
rates even with the settings maxed out, with almost 200 FPS at 4K, although the 1% lows
improve quite a bit in this test with lower resolutions, and I doubt anyone playing competitively
would seriously consider 4K and high settings anyway.
Rainbow Six Siege was tested using the built in benchmark, I’ve found this test to pretty
much always score high FPS on any half decent hardware, so even with ultra settings at 4K
it’s not too surprising that we’re still able to average above 100 FPS, with much higher
frame rates possible at 1440p and 1080p.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was also tested using the built in benchmark, and at 1440p
and 1080p we’re still able to average above 60 FPS in this test with maximum settings,
so expect pretty decent improvements at lower levels. 4K wasn’t great at max settings,
but again I’d expect lower settings to probably be somewhat playable.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was tested with the built in benchmark too, and as a fairly
resource demanding game we’re only just able to average 60 FPS here at 1080p with
ultra settings, although I don’t think you really need a high frame rate to play this
one, 1440p with good settings should still go alright.
PUBG was tested using the replay feature, and for an unoptimized game it was still giving
pretty nice results at ultra settings at 1080p and 1440p. Pretty poor performance at 4K though,
but it might actually run alright with low settings, but for this sort of game you’d
probably want a lower resolution to maximize FPS anyway.
Far Cry 5 was tested with the built in benchmark, and at ultra settings the frame rates are
quite nice considering we’re using ultra settings for the 1440p and 1080p tests. Not
too terrible for 4K, again considering max settings, so we could probably get decent
FPS with lower settings at 4K.
Watch Dogs 2 is a resource intensive game, however I’ve found that I can play it perfectly
fine with a solid 30 FPS, and that’s what we’ve got here at 4K, although I probably
would drop the settings a bit to get a little higher frame rate, as I don’t think you
get much of a visual improvement going from say very high to ultra. 1440p and 1080p on
the other hand ran very nicely, even at ultra settings.
The Witcher 3 was tested with Hairworks disabled, and even with 4K at ultra settings we’re
only just below the 60 FPS sweet spot with a 1% low result not too far below the average,
with some slight setting drops it should play pretty well at 4K, and no problems at all
at 1440p and 1080p.
Shadow of War was tested using the built in benchmark, and fairly good results here too.
Considering 4K was averaging 50 FPS in this test at max settings, it would likely actually
be playable with lower settings at 4K.
As we’ve seen we’re able to get some pretty good performance in the games tested, 1440p
with good settings ran well for the most part, while 4K wasn’t a great experience, at least
with max settings which I’ve shown here. In some less demanding games like Overwatch
you’d be able to run alright at 4K with good settings, and for others it may be alright
at low settings, but for the most part MSI’s 2070 Gaming Z seems to be aimed towards 1440p
gaming with good settings.
Ray tracing on the other hand in Battlefield 5 was disappointing, hopefully performance
will improve in the future as it’s still a new technology, but the entry level RTX
2070 is only giving us playable performance at 1080p and 1440p with medium or low settings,
and that’s assuming you’re not after high frame rates, which are generally beneficial
in games like this.
For overclocking I’ve retested with Far Cry 5. I was able to overclock the GPU core
by 60MHz and the memory by 400MHz, although I didn’t spend too long tweaking the memory.
This wasn’t that much extra, but keep in mind it’s already overclocked pretty well
out of the box.
I’ve retested with ultra settings which should be more GPU demanding, and at 1080p
there’s only a small 0.2% improvement to the average frame rate with the overclock
applied, a larger 4.2% improvement at 1440p, and then a 5.4% improvement at 4K, better
results at higher resolutions as we become less CPU bound.
So we’re seeing some decent performance, but what are the thermals like? These are
the temperatures I measured with the Heaven benchmark using Hardware Info with an ambient
room temperature of 23 degrees Celsius. It wasn’t getting that hot in my testing, and
even with the manual overclock applied it was only a little warmer at 70 degrees. It
was fairly cool at idle, considering the fans weren’t spinning at all, they don’t even
spin up until it reaches 60 degrees Celsius. With the fan maxed out there was a large drop
in thermals, but the fan noise rose quite a bit too as a result.
Just for fun here’s how the backplate looked after 30 minutes of stress test running, getting
to about the 65 degree Celsius mark.
I’ve got the average and peak clock speeds while running the Heaven benchmark for an
extended period, and with the overclock applied I was able to average around 143MHz above
the stock speed by increasing the core clock by 60MHz and increasing the power limit to
111% using MSI Afterburner.
These are the average and peak fan speeds measured under the same tests as the temperatures
just shown. Even at stock they were quiet compared to the rest of the system, making
almost no difference while gaming even once manually overclocked. With the latest version
of MSI’s Afterburner I was able to boost the fans to 100%, reaching over 2600 RPM and
finally becoming fairly audible. Here’s how these tests sounded so you can get an
idea for yourself.
As I’ve got 7 other fans in the case there’s not much difference, but at idle the fans
on the graphics aren’t spinning at all, so using that as a baseline there’s almost
no difference between idle and the stress tests. It’s just not making much noise until
we manually boost the fans.
I’ll also note that while testing there was no noticeable coil whine with my card.
Here’s what total system power draw looked like in the same Heaven benchmark, so once
manually overclocked there’s a 5% increase to power draw for a 7% improvement to clock
speed, which resulted in a 5% improvement in Far Cry 5 at 4K with ultra settings.
MSI recommend a 550 Watt power supply or above, and note that the card itself has a power
consumption of 225 Watts. I was seeing around a 227 Watt difference with my GPU stress test
running, though I’d expect some of this would be increased CPU activity too.
For up to date pricing check the links in the description, as pricing will change over
time. At the time of recording, here in Australia the MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Gaming Z is going
for around $1039 AUD, or just under $600 USD on Amazon for my international viewers.
The Gaming Z appears to be the top end 2070 in MSI’s line up at the moment. In Australia
this makes it $100 more expensive than MSI’s 2070 Armor OC card I recently looked at, but
a lower $30 difference in the US. The Gaming Z definitely has a nicer overall build quality,
there’s more lighting, and due to the higher boost clock out of the box it was performing
a little better, though this only resulted in a few frames per second extra, so you’ll
have to decide if this more premium 2070 option is worth it for you.
In conclusion MSI’s RTX 2070 Gaming Z graphics card seems to be well suited to 1080p and
1440p gaming, but if you’re after 4K gaming or actually getting good frame rates with
ray tracing outside of low settings at 1080p, you may need to look at a 2080 or 2080Ti instead.
The card looks great in my opinion, but does cost a bit more than other 2070’s available,
so you’ll have to weigh up the features and how much performance you can likely gain
overclocking a cheaper card yourself.
So what did you guys think of MSI’s RTX 2070 Gaming Z graphics card? Let me know your
thoughts down in the comments, and leave a like on the video if you found it useful.
Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe for more GPU testing, including
MSI’s RTX 2080Ti Gaming X Trio which is coming up next.