Review: MSI GTX 1070

So I switched to a 4K monitor a while back, and the old Ice Dragon 770 4G just couldn’t keep up with Doto 2 or Overwatch at native 4K. Overwatch was still playable, but from what I could tell it was rendering at 2K and upscaling to 4K — not exactly the pure experience I wanted!

So I figured it was time to sell it and get a new card.

I ended up going with the MSI reference 1070. Why reference? First, reference cards look better. Second, MSI was the only first-tier brand I could actually buy on JD at the time. Third, I wanted to see whether the reference blower cooler would do better than the Ice Dragon’s “one fan spins up and the whole case turns into a pressure cooker, to the point where my crappy CPU starts screaming” situation.

The reference card is definitely way better than that beast of an Ice Dragon — shorter, smaller. The old one was just ridiculous…

Finally I ran Overwatch for a bit at native 4K. Couldn’t crank it to Epic, only High.

I don’t think I had V-Sync on, but it doesn’t really matter — 60 FPS is plenty. After about an hour of playing, the GPU was hovering around 76–80°C, and the CPU never went above 70°C again. The old situation where the GPU hit full load and the CPU overheated and screamed? Didn’t happen. Looks like the blower cooler suits my little hotbox after all.

As for Doto 2 on Linux, that’s basically no sweat at all — 4K, everything maxed, locked at 60 FPS.

So that’s that. This card should last me a while. The 770 lasted nearly 3 years, and not long after I bought it they fucking announced the 970 — same price, nearly double the performance. I was livid…