MSI GeForce GTX 1070 AERO Review | 118 Data compared

The MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Aero ITX OC is an ultra-compact graphics card factory-overclocked to a 1531MHz base and 1721MHz boost clock, purposefully built for shoe-box-sized Mini-ITX cases. Its primary advantage is its incredibly small footprint, measuring just 175mm by 129mm by 39mm, which makes it roughly 17 percent smaller overall than competitor options like the Zotac GTX 1070Ti Mini. This exceptional space-saving design makes it highly compatible with extremely tight PC builds while still offering a performance upgrade over reference Founders Edition cards out of the box. However, the major drawback of the card lies in its compromised cooling design, which was aggressively shrunk from MSI's larger "ZeroFrozr" design to fit the ITX form factor. Because of these tight dimensions, the card is equipped with a much less capable heatsink and relies on a single 100mm fan rather than a dual-fan setup. This reduction in thermal mass and airflow limits the card's cooling potential, ultimately causing it to fall short of expectations when compared to competitor mini models on the market.

The MSI GTX 1070 Aero ITX 8G OC delivers full Pascal performance, featuring 1,920 CUDA cores and 8GB GDDR5, within a compact form factor designed for mini-ITX cases. Operating at a factory-overclocked boost of 1,886 MHz, the card utilizes a single-fan Torx cooler with Zero Frozr technology to keep temperatures below 70°C, all powered by a single 8-pin connector. Pros include its excellent performance-to-size ratio and silent, low-load operation, though the card suffers from lower base clock speeds compared to larger variants and limited, noisy, or hot performance under aggressive manual overclocking due to the single-fan constraints.

The MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Aero ITX OC is a compact graphics card designed specifically for small form factor DIY PC builds, such as Mini-ITX or Micro ATX systems. Measuring just 17 cm in length, this card features a Pascal GP104-A1 GPU with 1920 shader processors and a minor factory overclock out of the box. It utilizes 8GB of standard GDDR5 memory running at 2,000 MHz (8 GHz effective) to achieve a memory bandwidth of 256 GB/s and a single-precision floating-point performance of roughly 6.45 TFLOP/s. The primary advantages of this graphics card are its compact 17 cm form factor and its exceptionally quiet operation, ranking as the most silent 8GB version tested by the reviewer while still delivering reliable cooling via its revised ACX-style cooler. Conversely, its main drawbacks stem from the architectural limitations imposed to separate it from the higher-tier GTX 1080. Specifically, it lacks the faster GDDR5X memory type, relies on fewer active streaming multiprocessors (15 out of 20), and consequently experiences a performance drop down from the 9 TFLOP/s found on the GTX 1080.