Introduction

MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Gaming Trio OC is a premium custom-design rendition of NVIDIA’s new performance-segment GPU that launched earlier this month. The Gaming series of graphics cards played a pivotal role in building the MSI brand since its introduction in the early 2010s. Even though it’s been supplanted by the SUPRIM and Vanguard lines of enthusiast custom design brands, it still offers a compelling combination of product design, aesthetics, cooler capabilities, and factory OC. The GeForce RTX 5070 is possibly the most important model in the RTX 50-series Blackwell generation yet. It targets the broadest segment of the PC gaming market, offering maxed out gameplay at 1440p, including with ray tracing; or 1080p high refresh-rate gameplay.

The new Blackwell graphics architecture introduces Neural Rendering, a new technology in consumer 3D graphics that combines objects created by a generative AI model with conventional raster 3D scenes much in the same way as RTX brings ray traced objects to it. You need little introduction to the awesome capabilities of generative AI models to create photorealistic images and video, and can imagine its impact on gaming. AI hence plays a bigger role in rendering, and isn’t just relegated to the DLSS upscaler. This is made possible due to a new hardware-based scheduler component called the AI Management Processor (AMP), which lets the GPU accelerate AI models and render graphics in tandem.

The new Blackwell SM sees all 128 CUDA cores being capable of concurrent FP32 and INT32 math; only half the cores in an older Ada generation SM were capable of INT32. The shader execution reordering engine of Blackwell comes with the ability to reorder neural shaders. The 5th Gen Tensor core leverages FP4 data formats to increase throughput in lieu of precision. The 4th Gen RT comes with even more fixed function hardware, this time to enable Mega Geometry—a concept similar to Mega Textures, which allows ray traced objects to have exponentially higher triangle counts by leveraging hierarchies.

The GeForce RTX 5070 debuts the new GB205 silicon, the company’s third gaming GPU based on the architecture. The RTX 5070 nearly maxes it out, enabling 48 out of 50 streaming multiprocessors present on the silicon. This works out to 6,144 CUDA cores, 192 Tensor cores, 48 RT cores, and 192 TMUs. The RTX 5070 gets all 80 ROPs present on the silicon, which is an increase over the 64 that the RTX 4070 came with. It also gets more on-die cache, with 48 MB on tap, compared to the 36 MB of the RTX 4070. While the memory size hasn’t changed—it’s still only 12 GB—the memory bandwidth sees a significant 33% increase thanks to the 28 Gbps GDDR7 memory being used.

The MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Gaming Trio OC features a very similar board design as the RTX 5070 Ti Gaming Trio OC+ we recently reviewed. It is a slightly toned down version of the Tri Frozr 4 cooler MSI debuted with the Vanguard family of graphics cards, in that the cooler doesn’t get a vapor chamber baseplate—it uses a nickel-plated copper plate—and has fewer heat pipes, but has all other innovations by MSI for this generation, including a new aluminium fin arrangement that maximizes turbulence for heat dissipation; and the latest generation of StormForce axial airflow fans. MSI is giving the RTX 5070 factory overclocked speeds of 2610 MHz compared to 2512 MHz reference. The company is pricing the RTX 5070 Gaming Trio OC at $650, a $100 premium over the NVIDIA baseline price for the RTX 5070.