INTRODUCTION

   After many months of waiting NVIDIA has finally unveiled their brand new GeForce RTX 4080 & 4070 Super graphics cards and this means two things for gamers, better performance for less money (MSRP is less compared to the non-super models at launch while performance according to my colleagues is roughly 15-20% up) and further reduced prices for the non-super models. So, if you're out in the market looking to get your hands on a GeForce graphics card the non-super 4080 & 4070 models should become quite appealing before long. Now i may not have one of these Super cards here with me today but i do have one GeForce RTX 4070 model which hasn't gotten nearly the attention it deserves, the Gaming Slim by MSI.

   MSI is a world leader in gaming, content creation, business & productivity and AIoT solutions. Bolstered by its cutting-edge R&D capabilities and customer-driven innovation, MSI has a wide-ranging global presence spanning over 120 countries. Its comprehensive lineup of laptops, graphics cards, monitors, motherboards, desktops, peripherals, servers, IPCs, robotic appliances, and vehicle infotainment and telematics systems are globally acclaimed. Committed to advancing user experiences through the finest product quality, intuitive user interface and design aesthetics, MSI is a leading brand that shapes the future of technology.

   The GeForce RTX 4070 is based on a cut-down version of NVIDIA's AD104 chip which in this case packs a total of 5888 CUDA cores, 46 streaming multiprocessors (SM's), 46 ray accelerators (or ray tracing cores), 184 Tensor cores, 64 raster units (or render output units) and 184 TMUs (texture mapping units). It's memory setup includes a grand total of 12GB GDDR6X on a 192-bit interface which results to 504.2GB/s of bandwidth. Even though the GeForce RTX 4070 made its debut back in April of 2023 the Gaming Slim line by MSI wasn't introduced until August of that year and so it's a rather new model still. As its name suggests the Gaming Slim is a two-slot (46mm) graphics card (available in both black and white color) which MSI has paired with a dual heatsink cooler together with a nickel plated copper baseplate (Tri Frozr 3 design), three fans (Torx Fan 5.0), partial metal backplate and a single ARGB zone. As expected, the Gaming Slim is powered by a single +12VHPWR connector and as for clocks even though at default the card maintains its stock/vanilla ones (1920 core, 2475MHz boost and 1313MHz memory) according to MSI these can easily increase by using their MSI center software (up to 2490MHz boost). Finally, in regards to available connectivity the GeForce RTX 4070 Gaming Slim by MSI comes ready with three DisplayPort v1.4a ports and a single HDMI v2.1a port.