The last word:
Price?
Let’s get straight down to pricing, which is often the most complicated aspect of partner boards compared to NVIDIA’s Founders Edition. There’s no Founders Edition here, so we’ll be basing ourselves on the MSRP price set by NVIDIA, which is 889 euros ($799). Our example of the day, the MSI RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Ventus 3x, will (logically) be available at this price from tomorrow. Remember that the MSRP for the RTX 4070 Ti was 899 euros. NVIDIA is therefore offering a higher-performance card, but with a 10-euro reduction, i.e. at the same price, except that the memory is increased from 12 to 16 GB.
We looked up the current price of an MSI RTX 4070 Ti Ventus 3x and found it to be around 929 euros, not far from the MSRP of 899 euros.
Performance?
As you’ll have noticed from our various tests, our MSI RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Ventus 3x doesn’t really stand out from the RTX 4070 Ti, gaining 3.7% in 1440p rasterization and 6.2% in 2160p rasterization – nothing to get excited about. Naturally, we asked ourselves why our results were so low. We can already point to the fact that our RTX 4070 Ti is a Gigabyte Gaming OC with factory overclocking, whereas our RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Ventus 3x has base frequencies. The other thing is that the power limit is blocked on the MSI, but what we noticed most of all is that even if the boost frequency increases, it’s not continuous and drops back down quickly. We have contacted NVIDIA, which acknowledges that performance is below what we would expect and is investigating this model. Is there a problem with the BIOS of the MSI RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Ventus 3x? We’re waiting to hear (see below).
What we can say is that tomorrow we’ll be bringing you a second test of a partner card, but not at MSRP prices, and which is the same model as our RTX 4070 Ti, namely a Gigabyte RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Gaming OC. This will enable us to judge the performance and differences between the two chipsets.
New BIOS, a few hours before publication :
As we pointed out in the introduction, we received a new BIOS for our MSI on Monday morning, but due to lack of time it was no longer possible for us to redo all our tests. We nevertheless installed it and ran a few tests to judge its potential. In rasterization, under Cyberpunk 2077, we went from a gain of 2 to 3.1% over the RTX 4070 in 1440p, and from 3.5 to 6.4% in 2160p. There’s no doubt that this BIOS will improve performance, and we’ll be publishing this article with the results of the new BIOS as soon as possible, but GPU news is fairly dense this week, with a release also planned by AMD.
Which card?
Despite being an entry-level model, this MSI RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Ventus 3x suffers from no real defects. The cooling system is good, but not as robust as other high-end models. The fans are quiet, and the ventilation curve could be reworked to improve cooling. Our only negative point concerns the very plastic fairing and the use of a plastic backplate. Its sole purpose is to stiffen the PCB. Finally, we’d be very curious to test MSI’s compact model with its “Ventus 2x” version
What’s next?
We’ll have one model left to test at the end of January, the RTX 4080 SUPER, which will take the place of the RTX 4080 in the NVIDIA range since the latter will no longer be produced.
MSI RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Ventus 3x
As we haven’t had the time to test our MSI RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Ventus 3x with the new BIOS, we’ll refrain from giving it an award for the time being, or giving you a definitive opinion on this RTX 4070 Ti SUPER. We therefore invite you to come back tomorrow to compare two identical models in Gigabyte Gaming OC, but one in RTX 4070 Ti and the other in RTX 4070 Ti SUPER. We’ll then be able to pinpoint the exact performance gain. Thanks to NVIDIA and MSI for providing us with a copy of the MSI RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Ventus 3x.
