Review – MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ventus 3X

With NVIDIA launching the new GeForce RTX 4070 today, we can expect to see the custom design from the board partners as well but the base models for now. The first custom RTX 4070 we have here is the GeForce RTX 4070 Ventus 3X, which is the entry model for this release from MSI.

For the price of RM 3,049, the RTX 4070 Ventus 3X offers the exact same features you’ll find on the RTX 4070 Founders Edition but with a custom cooling solution by MSI. Let’s see if the RTX 4070 Ventus 3X manage to live up to the expectation this time.

Specifications

Unboxing

The RTX 4070 Ventus 3X ships in the simple but standard package as usual but the design on the box, in my opinion, is much better than what we’ve seen from the previous generation design. At the back of the box, you’ll find most of the details on the features available on this card.

Despite not being equipped with the higher-end cooler that is seen on the more expensive models like the Gaming X Trio, the cooler on the RTX 4070 Ventus 3X is still a proper heatsink with MSI’ TORX Fan 4.0 instead of just being a block of Aluminum. In terms of the design, I’d say it’s still reasonable and it will match the silver color scheme of the MAG Z790 Tomahawk Wifi or B760M Mortar Wifi well if you’re building a system in the mentioned theme.

Since it’s a dual-slot card, the RTX 4070 Ventus 3X can fit better in tighter space as compared to the higher-end models with massive heatsinks. This will benefit those who are into small form factor builds, in a way.

While all the RTX 40 series cards we’ve seen up till this day all come with the new 12VHPWR connector, the rated TDP at 200W allows the existing PCIe 8-pin connector on the RTX 4070. The RTX 4070 Ventus 3X is definitely one of the models that come with a PCIe 8-pin for power, with 150W being supplied from the PCIe 8-pin cable and 75W from the PCIe slot.

And for the display output, we can see the standard 3 x DisplayPort and 1 x HDMI on the RTX 4070 Ventus 3X.

Test System Setup

To put the RTX 4070 Ventus X3 to the test, we have compared it against 3 different cards – the RTX 3080 10G OC, RTX 4070 Ti, and RTX 4070 Founders Edition to gauge the performance of this card. For our games benchmark test, we’ve selected a number of AAA titles to run at their highest possible settings using the following setup under an ambient temperature of 28°C:

Games Benchmark – Raster Performance

From the results, we can see that the RTX 4070 Ventus 3X still has decent raster performance and can handle 4K gaming to some degree. It can achieve an average of over 60fps in some titles even without having to enable DLSS. However, it struggles with more demanding games like Watch Dogs Legion and Cyberpunk 2077, which can be resolved easily by enabling DLSS.

While it doesn’t completely outperform the RTX 3080, the RTX 4070 Ventus 3X has comparable performance in the games tested just like the Founders Edition model.

At 1440P, the RTX 4070 Ventus 3X can easily handle almost all titles with above 100fps on average, which is no surprise since NVIDIA has clearly stated that the GPU is targeted at 1440P gaming in their marketing materials. While the performance is very similar to both the RTX 3080 and RTX 4070 FE, there are times when it just runs worse than the FE for some reason.

As the cards here can handle 1080p without any trouble, it’s not a very interesting test at this point and we’re only doing it to show you the full picture here. I can’t think of any reason for one to purchase the RTX 4070 just to game at this resolution.

Games Benchmark – Ray Tracing Performance

Moving on to the ray tracing performance, we’re using the usual preset for our tests, which are the highest graphics settings and DLSS Quality mode. The RTX 4070 can still pull off 4K gaming in some titles, managing 60fps on average most of the time but some titles are just too demanding for both RTX 4070 and RTX 3080, like Cyberpunk 2077, Metro Exodus, and Watch Dogs Legion. You’ll need to lower the DLSS mode to Performance or Balanced to get more FPS in these games. And that’s only if you really want to play at 4K.

For 1440P gaming, despite some titles not hitting the average 100fps ‘standard’, I’d still consider it a decent gaming experience in overall. Even for demanding titles like Cyberpunk 2077, we’re still getting a reasonable average of 81fps on the RTX 4070 Ventus 3X. For other titles though, both RTX 3080 and RTX 4070 still trading blows in 1440p but we can see the latter performing similarly or better on most occasions.

For 1080p, the results are similar to the non-ray tracing test. Just like both the RTX 3080 and RTX 4070, the RTX 4070 Ventus 3X can easily achieve over 100fps in almost all the titles we tested.

DLSS 3 Hands-On

While I won’t say it’s inevitable, we cannot deny the fact that more games are getting DLSS 3 support in a way, both existing and upcoming ones. Despite the RTX 3080 is still a powerful card even today, the core feature of DLSS 3, Frame Generation is only available on the newer RTX 40 series GPU, which the previous generation GPU lacks.

Cyberpunk 2077, and other games like F1 22, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Diablo IV, and more, are just some of the titles with DLSS 3 ready but in order to experience the feature, you will need an RTX 40 series GPU and the RTX 4070 is one of them.

Synthetic benchmark

Next, we have the synthetic benchmarks, and the results are different from our gaming tests.

While it’s not too significant, the RTX 3080 still beats both the RTX 4070 in benchmarks that measure gaming performance, like 3DMark and Unigine Superposition. This is not exactly what we expected when running these tests, as the RTX 4070 is still capable of performing similarly to the RTX 3080 at some point.

Benchmarks that measure content creation performance, like Blender, OctaneBench 2020 1.5, and V-Ray Benchmark 5 though, show that the RTX 4070 is better.

Thermals & Power Draw

Finally, we have the thermals and power draw, and the results are consistent with the other RTX 40 series GPUs we’ve tested before. The RTX 3080 OC and RTX 4070 have similar performance based on our tests, but the power draw is very different.

The RTX 3080 OC can consume up to 375W at its peak, while the RTX 4070 only uses 203W at most. Surprisingly, the RTX 4070 Ventus 3X actually draws a little more power than the FE, which is at 209W even though the performance is about the same. Still, it’s obvious that the RTX 4070 is clearly more power-efficient.

For the temperature, the RTX 4070 Ventus X3 runs a tad bit cooler than the FE, with GPU load temperature peaked at 70°C, while memory junction and hotspot temperature peaked at 86°C and 85°C respectively.

Final thoughts

Although the performance and power efficiency are pretty much the same as the RTX 4070 Founders Edition, the RTX 4070 Ventus 3X does has its own advantage over the FE. The most notable would be the use of PICe 8-pin instead of the new 12VHPWR for power, which makes upgrading from an older GPU to the RTX 4070 very easy as you don’t need to upgrade to a new power supply or have to deal with cable management issue after using the included 2 x 8-pin PCIe to 1 x 12VHPWR adapter.

As for the cooler, the difference is at about 2°C on the GPU load temperature if we compare it to the FE but thanks to the custom design, we can actually see a lower temperature on other components and parts of the PCB such as the hotspot temperature and memory junction temperature. It’s not a fancy one but it did manage to get the job done perfectly.

Price-wise, the RTX 4070 Ventus 3X is retailed at RM 3,049 according to the information provided, which I think is still reasonable for what it has to offer. Sure you can get a used RTX 3090 at about this price as well but that is only if you don’t care about features like DLSS 3, AV1 video encoding, new RTX video super-resolution also known as RTX VSR that is also coming to VLC player, and other AI-accelerated features on content creation tools.