MSI RTX 2070 Armor Review

Up Close

The MSI Armor has a very industrial looking box. It seems a shame that nVidia are apparently determined their partners use the full size, full colour RTX logo as it slightly detracts from the grungy aesthetic. And now we’ve had an idea to mod this card into the GPU equivalent of a rat rod. Ahem. Sticking with what we have…

  

Older MSI graphics cards had a black half and a red half. The MSI Trio X we reviewed for our RTX 2080 reviews was all black, but the RTX 2070 Armor goes back to a two colour system, albeit a monochrome one with the left hand fan having a white surround. We’d obviously prefer black ourselves as it would better blend in with the modern aesthetic, but it’s better than red.

  

The backplate helps spread any heat across the whole of the PCB to eliminate warping, and it’s a good place for MSI to apply their famous Dragon logo that has been such a feature of their gaming range.

  

The Armor couldn’t consider itself amongst modern gaming hardware if it didn’t include RGB lighting. The only area of the Armor that supports the MSI Mystic Light is the logo itself, but given that is the part of the card we see the clearest when looking through our side windows that makes perfect sense.

  

We saw with the MSI Trio how their extremely high fin density helped keep the card cool and disperse heat, and the MSI Armor is no exception. There is a suite of smooth heatpipes and copper GPU baseplate all kept cool with two TORX Fans.

  
  

At the business end of the RTX 2070 Armor we have 8+6 pin PCIe power inputs, whilst outputs are handled by 3 v1.4 DisplayPort outputs, an HDMI 2.0b and a USB Type-C for those of you with a VR headset.