MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming Z Graphics Card Review

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

The Z cards in MSI’s line up are the top of the line cards you can purchase from them. The come with a decent overclock out of the box and the ability to push it slightly more. MSI’s latest 1070 matches the popular athestitcs on their motherboards and makes for homogeneous appearance inside the bowels of your case. If you happen to be running both a motherboard (that supports the gaming app) and the MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming Z, you can control all LED effects on both products from one application.

MSI’s GTX 1070 Gaming Z is no slouch in the gaming arena. At this point overclocking yielded very small gains as I was only able to get a 15MHz over clock above the OC profle. However, MSI afterburner reported the maximum clock speeds just breaching the 2.0 GHz mark at 2050MHz during some of the tests. The cooler that sits on top of the card is MSI’s latest version of the TwinFrozr series.  It seems that every release it gets better. This revision give the cooler an even more aggressive styling than the GTX 970. The cooler is quiet and fan speeds hovered between 30 and 40 percent when testing and temperatures maxed out at 64°C.  The LED effects are a nice touch when every thing is in sync however, I did find that having all three LEDs flash at different intervals got annoying very quickly.

At the time of this review, I could not find pricing on amazon or newegg, but there are a couple of potentially mis-named cards with the same specifications as the Z and priced at $525 but all were out of stock or not available; when pricing becomes available, I will update this review to reflect pricing.  I really like MSI’s offering with the Gaming Z, it offers a slightly higher clock speed than the Gaming X, but brings in extra LEDs for a little bit of flash and flair. I was impressed to see that MSI was able to keep the overall height to under 2 inches as that will benefit those consumers that will run a SLI configuration as it offers more space between the cards and help with cooling.

The MSI GeForce 1070 Gaming Z is the top end 1070 in MSI’s stable. Honestly, I like the card, but the actual retail price will determine the value. The differences between the X and Z are small at best. At this point it comes down to user preference. Is it worth it to you for the extra overclock and LEDs from the factory? Only you can answer that question. If you’re looking to have one of the absolute top end 1070’s the MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming Z would make a great addition to the list.