MSI has engineered a behemoth RTX 2070 with their GeForce RTX 2070 Gaming Z. The card is massive and looks the part because of its large triple-slot cooler. Out of the box, the card is overclocked to a boost frequency of 1830 MHz, which is 120 MHz higher than the Founders Edition and 210 MHz higher than the reference. With those frequencies, it's one of the highest-clocked RTX 2070 cards available. Averaged over all of our benchmarks at 1440p resolution, the MSI Gaming Z is 4% faster than the Founders Edition—not a lot. Compared to the GTX 1080, the card is 21% faster; the GTX 1080 Ti is only another 5% faster. AMD's flagship, the Vega 64, is 20% slower, and the RTX 2080 is 15% ahead of the MSI RTX 2070 Gaming Z. Overall, the RTX 2070 is an excellent choice for maximum details 1440p gaming, able to give you at least 60 FPS in all recent titles. High-FPS 1080p gaming is possible, too, but the card won't reach 144 FPS in all titles at that resolution unless you dial down some settings.

As mentioned before, MSI's cooler is big, which means it has a ton of cooling potential, which MSI paired with excellent fan settings. In idle, the fans shut off completely for the perfect noise-free experience during desktop work, Internet browsing, and media playback. When gaming, the card is extremely quiet with only 30 dBA, which means you won't hear the fans spinning at full gaming load, not in a case with another actively cooled component, like a CPU cooler or radiator. This is possible only because of MSI's smart fan settings in the BIOS. The card runs a well-tuned balance between noise levels and temperatures, and doesn't just go crazy with high fan noise at the lowest temperatures.

Like all other GeForce 20 cards, the MSI RTX 2070 Gaming Z is held back by Turing's power limits despite the addition of an extra 6-pin power connector. While previous generations were limited by GPU temperatures, cards will now sit in their power limit all the time during gaming, which means the highest boost clocks are never reached during regular gameplay. MSI did increase the board power limit from 185 W to 225 W; even higher values would have definitely helped yield more performance. The VRM is upgraded to 8-phase as well, so more power draw shouldn't have been a problem.

Manual overclocking has once more become more complicated with this generation. Since the cards are always running in the power limiter, you can no longer just dial in stable clocks for the highest boost state to find the maximum overclock. The biggest issue is that you can't just reach that state reliably, so your testing is limited to whatever frequency your test load is running at. Nevertheless, we managed to pull through and achieved a good overclock on our RTX 2070 that translated into 8% additional performance.

With a price of $600, the MSI Gaming Z matches the RTX 2070 Founder Edition and is clearly the better buy unless you thirst for the looks of the Founders Edition, which are unbeatable. Everything else, the MSI card handles better: performance, noise, idle fan stop, VRM; the card ticks all the boxes. Still, $600 is a lot of money, especially when you can have RTX 2070 "reference" models for $500, which is $100 less—20%. We recently reviewed the EVGA RTX 2070 Black, which comes at that price point and delivers excellent performance (that is a few percent lower than the MSI card), includes fan stop, and has decent noise levels. On the other hand, if you have three slots available in your case and want maximized cooling performance from your graphics card, the MSI RTX 2070 Gaming Z should be on your list.