MSI RTX 2070 Armor Graphics Card Review

Overclocking, Noise, Heat and Power

The Armor is already overclocked a little out of the box. Of course, with that massive cooler, it’s designed to be able to push its boost clock without throttling and it certainly seems to do a great job of that. While we did manage to push another 180 MHz on the core and 600 MHz on the memory, it didn’t have a huge impact on performance. It still performed about the same as a similarly overclocked GTX 1080 or VEGA 64. However, for a little boost to your performance, for free, it’s nothing to complain about. I did increase the fan profile a little, but the heat wasn’t really an issue anyway. Although, with a higher fan speed, the card was still surprisingly quiet.

3DMark Firestrike

Acoustic Performance

One of my favourite features is the zero RPM fan mode. At idle or low-load, the fans do not even spin, making it completely silent. This does mean a higher idle temperature, but it’s designed that way, so nothing to worry about there. If it gets hot, the fans will kick in and fix the problem in no time.

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Overclocked

Thermal Performance

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Overclocked

Power Consumption

It should come as a surprise to all but those who skipped the last few pages that its power consumption is… You guessed it, similar to the GTX 1080! In fact, at load, it’s flipping identical. It used 2 more watts overclocked, but that’s within a margin of error anyway.

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Overclocked