Card Layout and Photos
Coming from the RTX 4070 Founders Edition before checking out the MSI RTX 4070 Ventus 3X is a little jarring. Nvidia is going a completely different direction with their cards and it is really obvious, especially with the Founder Edition having an all-metal heatsink design including the integrated backplate whereas the 4070 Ventus 3X has a plastic fan shroud and backplate. The 4070 Ventus 3X is also significantly longer, sitting just past 12 inches long. The card is slightly taller as well with 13 mm above the top of the PCI bracket but for thickness, this isn’t a thick card, it fits in the standard 2-slot design which is good to see. The plastic fan shroud allows for the shroud design to have more styling to it but MSI has kept things relatively simple with it bulging out around each of the three fans but none of the crazy styling some of their high-end cards end up with. The black fans along with the silver shroud with black on the top edge give a nice color contrast while still sticking with neutral colors that will work in most builds.
The fan side of the 4070 Ventus 3X has three matching fans packed in nearly touching each other. Each fan has the MSI logo in the middle with a black and silver sticker that matches the shroud design. Each fan is around 86 mm wide and each fan has 10 blades. This is MSIs Torx Fan 4.0 design which has the blades connected in pairs to give them additional strength without going for the full ring that adds even more weight to the fan. Each fan spins counterclockwise and is designed to blow air down into the heatsink below it. The zoomed-in view of the fan also gives us a peak at the ribbed design on the top of the heatsink inside. This helps spread out the fan airflow across the cooler and keeps the noise down as well. The heatsink is a standard aluminum fin design with uses heatpipes to run the length of the card to pull heat out across the long cooler. They have squared-off heatpipes when over top of the GPU to get the most contact and a copper baseplate over the GPU and surrounding area. The fans also have their Zero Frozr mode which means they turn off when temperatures are low for silent operation.
The top and bottom views of the 4070 Ventus 3X give us another view of the heatsink design which you relatively thin on the GPU side of the card with a few areas where it is thinner to avoid components but they didn’t fill in the gaps where space was available. Instead, the design is focused on getting the heatsink thicker down past the end of the PCB. The fan shroud does wrap around on the edges but only about halfway, leaving room for the horizontal heatsink layout to vent air out the top and bottom of the card. The top edge doesn’t have any fancy backlit accents or logos but they have printed the MSI logo and GeForce RTX branding on the top edge. On the end, MSI did include a support bracket if your case supports it. The end also gives us a peak at the heatpipes that run the length of the card. The top edge of the card also has the power connection which is right at the end of the PCB. This was a big surprise for me, I expected a 12VHPWR just like the Founders Edition but MSI went with a single 8-pin connection for the 4070 Ventus 3X. This is flipped around with the clip on the PCB side which the PCB is notched to allow for as is the backplate.
The PCI bracket end of the 4070 Ventus 3X has all of the display connections down the one side. You get three DisplayPort connections and one HDMI which is down at the bottom. All four also have labels stamped into the metal bracket as well. Then above that the rest of the space is filled with small round holes for ventilation, not that the cooler design is focusing any air in this direction.
The back of the 4070 Ventus 3X does have a backplate that runs the length of the card. It is plastic, so heat transfer isn’t going to be very useful. MSI did leave a cutout for the back of the GPU to let air get to that. The backplate is black which is a big contrast to the silver finish on most of the fan side. It has a brushed finish across most of the back but there are a few accents in a different texture that can be seen as well as MSI and GeForce RTX branding printed in white on it. The serial number sticker for the card is attached to the back and up at the top where it will be easy to see when installed in most cases which will make finding that easier but also takes a little away from the styling so I’m torn on if that is a good thing or a bad thing. You can see that the PCB ends just past the power connection and almost half of the 4070 Ventus 3X sticks out past the PCB for a larger heatsink to work with the triple fan design. The backplate has stylized slots cut in it for that area to allow at least some airflow to blow through.
For comparison, I did get pictures of the 4070 Ventus 3X next to the Nvidia RTX 4070 Founders Edition. The difference in styling is night and day, as is the card size differences with the 4070 Ventus 3X running well beyond the end of the Founders Edition. Interestingly though the Founders Edition is just slightly thicker which is exaggerated even more with its card design not venting out the top where the fan shroud on the Ventus is much shorter for the airflow.
