After much hype and excitement, Nvidia’s 40-series failed to impress us when it launched in late 2022. The issue was pricing and clearly a slap in the face of gamers who, for the most part, cannot justify spending upwards of R40,000 on a graphics card. This gave the 30-series time to mature in a market where gamers in South Africa were more focused on buying battery inverters than upgrading graphics cards. The GeForce 4070 Ti gave us a glimmer of hope, but with a price tag well over R20,000, it still put the barrier of entry to Nvidia’s 40-series cards out of reach for most of us.
That was until the boring ‘ol baseline 4070 launched to market. We received the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 from our friends at the local office and have been destroying pixels on it ever since. Interestingly, the RTX 4070 was initially named the RTX4080 12GB, but because this card features lower clock cores, RAM and CUDA cores compared to the 4080-series, it was delegated to the 4070s. Boring, it certainly is not.
At around R17,000, the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 is a good replacement for the GeForce RTX 3080 in terms of price and can, in some cases, outperform the RTX 3080 too. With 12GB of DDR6X RAM at your disposal and the full benefit of NVIDIA’s Ada Lovelace architecture at your fingertips, the 40-series has finally become a little more palatable. In case you are wondering, there are several things about Ada Lovelace to be excited about, most notably, DLSS3, which will improve your frame rates in-game significantly and AV1 encoding, which will enable far more efficient video streaming capabilities than older NVIDIA cards. This means content creators who stream live content will enjoy better resolutions, using less bandwidth.
With this in mind, I was rather excited to install my first 40-series graphics card into the NAG test bench. For this review, I used our high-end 11th gen Intel gaming rig featuring 64GB of DDR4 RAM, the Intel Core i7-11700K processor. Considering this machine’s original graphics card was the GeForce RTX 3080, it felt even more fitting to do these benchmarks on this PC.
When it comes to size, the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Gaming Trio X is very modest compared to the high-end RTX 4090 and not much different compared to the RTX 3080. In the box, you’ll find a 16-pin power cable splitter so that you don’t have to connect a bunch of PSU cables directly to the graphics card and a graphics card support bracket to help balance the weight of the card on your motherboard.
Right off the bat, I noticed how quietly this 40-series card was running. The fans are not nearly as loud as I expected, even under the load, while subtle RGB LEDs adorned parts of the outer shell.
With the card installed, we benchmarked and played games to better understand what this card is capable of – what a thought job.
As a mid-range graphics card, the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Gaming Trio X is a solid performer with game performance and benchmarks delivering impressive results. While it’s certainly capable of running games at modest settings on 4k, the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Gaming Trio X is better suited to 1440p gaming. Pushing this card at 4K will reveal the performance bottlenecks you’d expect from its 12GB of VRAM and lower Cuda core count, and this is perhaps one area where one could justify spending more money on a graphics card with more VRAM.
Having said that, DLSS3 is seriously impressive and makes a massive difference in upscaling your game content.
Looking at the 3DMark benchmarks, here are the results.
We also ran the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark
- Ray Tracing Ultra: 73fps
- Ray Tracing Medium: 80fps
- Ray Tracing Low: 108fps
- Ultra: 118fps
- High: 117fps
And finally, Geekbench 6 delivered a GPU score of 176,280.
It’s really hard not to like the offering Nvidia has created with the GeForce RTX 4070. It’s the first time we see value in upgrading to the 40-series, but gamers with high-end gaming rigs may be better served by getting the more expensive RTX 4080 or even the previous-gen RTX 3090, which is still an incredible performer. For my money, the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Gaming Trio X is an excellent way to get the best of both world’s without breaking the bank.
Check out for more on the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Gaming Trio X in episode 15 of the NAG Show.