Unboxing: Unboxing you get many papers; consisting of a Quickstart guide, a couple pieces of paper telling me how to register my GPU, a set of paper coasters (because MSI), the GPU itself inside of a very protective Styrofoam casing, along with a support bracket.
Installation: As I was replacing my old GTX 1070 ti, all I had to do was follow the, if somewhat cartoonish yet very helpful and straightforward installation guide. You need to undo the screws holding in the current GPU on the back of the case, then unclip the little buckle at the end of the PCIE express connector. Once that's done, you unplug the current GPU and remove it. Then, all you need to do is take your new GPU and push it from the back to the front until you hear a satisfying click. At which point you use the screws you took out at the beginning to screw it into place. Once this is done, you plug in the 6 and 8 pin connectors into the GPU. When you turn on the PC, it may start up with its default resolution, which for me, was this blurry 600 x 800. But once I went to Nvidia's driver page and installed the proper driver along with geforce experience, it was only a matter of time (no more than 20 minutes) to get the drivers installed and working perfectly. Once I got the drivers installed I just restarted by pc just incase. Once that was done, I installed MSI Afterburner to overclock. The best overclock I could get was 100mhz on both the core clock and memory, which was pretty good. It's important to note that I did not need to install the support bracket, so I can't say whether or not if it was easy to install.
Performance: The performance of this chip is much better than the GTX 1070 ti I was replacing, and rivals something like Nvidia's own GTX 1080. While I wasn't able to take full advantage of RTX ray tracing, I was able to fully max out Far Cry 5 on 2560 x 1080 and get 90+ frames with little to no fan noise. I also fully maxed out GTA V and, while it was a mixed bag of frame rates, I always stayed above 60 fps and never went beyond 75 degrees. Because of the massive heatsink on this GPU, the fans only speed up when the temperature is sustained at around 60+ degrees. The RGB lighting is pretty, but somewhat understated, and by no means should it be the deciding factor between this and another GPU of the same caliber.
Conclusion: Overall, this is a very nice GPU with subtle, yet pretty RGB and had great temps and performance all the way round. While it is one of the more larger GPU heatsinks I've seen, both in width and length, as I've said, its able to manage the RTX 2070 quietly and effectively. As a first time PC builder, this was incredibly easy to install and setup, and would recommend for someone who wants RTX power, but at a reasonable price to performance ratio.
| Memory Speed | 1830 MHz |
|---|---|
| Graphics Coprocessor | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 8 GB |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 1 |
