Overall, that's quite a different package than the one put together by Nvidia. It also has more and cooler visual flair if PC lighting is your thing, runs literally cooler as it has two fans instead of just one (as long as you don't mind them blowing inside the case, versus the Founders Edition's blow-through design), and good dedicated software. In contrast, compared to the Nvidia Founders Edition of the GTX 1070 ($399.00 at NVIDIA), which is essentially the "base model" of the GTX 1070 line, the MSI GTX 1070 Gaming Z has much higher clock speeds out of the box if you install the MSI Gaming App and click a few buttons. This card is also the same physical size as the GTX 1080 Gaming X card. (No big surprise, given what we have seen with the GTX 10 so far in general.) That's a pretty sweet deal, if you ask us, though you might not be able to buy a GTX 1070 Gaming Z card for a while, as stock was spotty when we wrote this. So how much do the extra bling and clock cycles cost? According to our searches of Newegg and several other e-tailers, about $20 separates the X and Z cards. And the X and Z cards feature the same excellent software package, and 8GB of GDDR5 memory. In a windowed case, it looks seriously cool.Īpart from that, the visual differences between the X and Z versions of the 1070 are minimal. Unlike on the Gaming X card, the placement of this LED on the part of the card that faces up shines some light up inside the chassis. The main difference is that on the X card, you can only change the colors of one of those LEDs, while the Z card has a third LED, an MSI badge on the backplate that has RGB lighting under it. Aside from higher clock speeds, the GTX 1070 Gaming Z model also has three RGB LEDs on the card chassis, compared to the Gaming X cards' two LEDs. Incidentally, also in the MSI Gaming App is a "Silent mode" setting, and under that, both the GTX 1070 Gaming Z and X cards dial to the same clock speeds as a reference-version or Founders Edition GTX 1070: a 1,506MHz base clock, and a 1,683MHz boost clock. To do that, you have to tweak the values yourself using an overclocking utility with granular settings, such as MSI's stalwart Afterburner software. In either mode in the MSI Gaming App, the Z manages a decent overclock, but the software is aimed mainly at those who don't like to overclock manually, since in our experience with the GTX 1080 and GTX 1060, the X and Z cards can reach speeds well beyond the default overclocks granted by the MSI Gaming App. These modes are switchable using a piece of software that MSI uses across all of these new cards, an easy utility called MSI Gaming App. In the card's one-step-down "Gaming mode," the Z card spins at up to 1,835MHz, while the X runs at 1,771MHz. First, the Gaming Z has higher overall maximum "boost" clock speeds, so in the card's "OC mode," the Z goes up to 1,860MHz, while the X goes to, ahem, just 1,797MHz. We've already sampled the X versions of its GTX 1080 ( the GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G) and GTX 1060 ( the GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming X 6G), so we were excited to check out the flagship card in the GTX 1070 line, the MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming Z 8G ($469), dubbed "Gaming Z." (There's also an X variant in the GTX 1070 line.) Since we already had a solid grasp on what the Gaming X package entailed, we were curious to see how MSI raised the bar for the Gaming Z.Ĭomparing the GTX 1070 Gaming X to the GTX 1070 Gaming Z, we noted a few big differences. Now, it would be funny if MSI actually had "A" through "Z" variants, but it actually has just "X" and "Z" cards.so far, at least. Best Hosted Endpoint Protection and Security Softwareįor the GeForce GTX 10-series GPUs, MSI has adopted a new naming scheme for its Gaming-series video cards that correlates with the last few letters of the alphabet the nearer the "Z," the better the card.
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