MSI GTX 1070 AERO OC purchase and tuning

The saying "penny wise and pound foolish" comes to mind.

1. Yes, while you have explained that this card is cheaper where you live, note that the link you gave shows it at $398 , the MSI Armor is just $375. I'd do some shopping and make sure that the price difference holds

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16814127951

2. It would appear that the choice of card model is being made to save initial cost, and then augment the cooling soon after .... so save $10 now only to pay an extra $60 for adapter + $50 - $100 for the CLC "soon after" ?

3. Out of the box, that card will throttle ... all FE designs do. But you can adjust the fan curve as was done here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaiHWAvUc2I&feature=youtu.be

As you can see the card maxes out at 75-76C.

NOTE: the 1070 starts to throttle at 82C. While headroom may make you sleep better at night when examining "what if" scenarios, 5 otherwise identical cards will perform exactly the same at 80C, 70C, 60C, 50C and 40C. NVidia's Boost 3 has two modes of operation:

> 82C ... throttle card to level which keeps temps below 82C
< 82C ... do no throttling

So while it's nice to have 5C or so "headroom", spending $100 - $150 on an aftermarket GPU cooler brings absolutely nothing tot he table.

The performance of a GFX card can be limited by the following:

a) Capacity of GPU cooling - Adding an aftermarket cooler to the mix may lower GU temps, but unless your card is throttling, there is zero performance increase to be gained. Your card doesn't throttle when fan curve is modified and that doesn't cost anything

b) Capacity of VRM / memory cooling - Most aftermarket coolers do nothing to improve things here ... some make it worse.

c) Capacity of Power Connector - Reference cards just about always have less power capacity than the AIB cards. The 8-pin connector allows 150 watts, thereby raising power capacity to 225 watts ... almost every 1070 out there tops out at < 200 watts, so in this case will have no impact.

d) BIOS / Overclocking Limits - Adding a aftermarket cooler obviously has no impact here.

In short, your expectation to "dramatically improve performance" is unfounded. It simply will not happen with the 10xx series. Under Boost 2.0, (9xx and older) you would sometimes see a significant increase in performance ... you would also see a significant difference in the performance of the various air cooled AIB cards. That's however is not true with the 10xx series. If you look at the reviews of air cooled AIB cards, as long as the card doesn't throttle, there is very little difference in performance and when there is, it's due to inadequate cooling of the VRM / Memory as we saw with the EVGA SC and FTW series.