MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Short Foundation

The MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Short Foundation V330-090R is a compact Pascal-era graphics card that still handles 1080p gaming surprisingly well. Owners love its quiet operation, low power draw, and small size. But at $375 USD or 438 to 458 EUR, it's overpriced for what you get in 2025. Buy it used for under $150 and it's a solid budget pick. Pay retail and you're getting burned.

The GTX 1070 Short Foundation puts up a PassMark G3D score of 13,513, which lands it around the 30th percentile for raster performance in our database. That's not great by today's standards, but it's important to remember this card launched in 2016. For 1080p gaming, it still delivers playable frame rates in titles like Fortnite, Apex Legends, Valorant, and older AAA games. You'll hit 60+ fps in most esports titles without breaking a sweat.

Compute sits at 6.46 FP32 TFLOPS, which puts it in the 15th percentile overall. That's fine for a card this old, but don't expect much from AI workloads or ray tracing. The RT score is 26th percentile, and honestly, this card doesn't do hardware ray tracing at all. It's a Pascal card. Any RT features you see in games are either software-based or simply not available. The 8GB of VRAM is still useful for 1080p textures, but it's GDDR5 at 256 GB/s, so memory bandwidth is a far cry from modern GDDR6 or GDDR6X cards.

Compared to modern budget cards, the GTX 1070 Short Foundation shows its age fast. The Gigabyte AORUS GV-N5080AORUS M-16GD and ASUS TUF Gaming TUF-RTX5070TI-O16G-GAMING are in a completely different universe, with 16GB of VRAM, hardware ray tracing, and multiple times the raw performance. Even the ZOTAC SOLID SFF OC and PNY OC VCG5070T16TFXPB1-O, which are also compact cards, leave the 1070 in the dust. The Sapphire PULSE 11322-02-20G is an AMD option that similarly outclasses it.

But here's the thing: none of those cards cost $375. They cost two to three times as much. If your budget is firmly under $200 and you need a small card that sips power, the GTX 1070 Short Foundation still has a niche. It's not competing with RTX 50-series cards. It's competing with used GTX 1660 Supers and RX 580s, and against those, it holds up reasonably well for 1080p gaming.

Value is where this card gets tricky. At $375 USD or 438 to 458 EUR, you're paying a premium for a GPU that's nearly a decade old. For that money, you could grab a used RTX 3060 or RX 6600 XT, both of which absolutely demolish the GTX 1070 in modern games and add features like DLSS or FSR. The affordability percentile sits at 76, which sounds okay, but that's relative to other listings of this specific card, not the broader GPU market. If you can find one used for under $150, it becomes a much more interesting budget option. At retail prices, it's a tough sell.

The MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Short Foundation V330-090R is a compact graphics card from the Pascal era that still shows up in listings today. It's based on the GTX 1070 Aero ITX design, which means MSI squeezed a full desktop GTX 1070 onto a shorter PCB for small form factor builds. With 8GB of GDDR5 on a 256-bit bus and a 1531MHz boost clock, this card was a serious 1080p gaming option when it launched, and it still holds up for budget builds in 2025 if you can find one at a sane price.

Pricing is all over the place depending on where you look. We're seeing it around $375 USD in the US, roughly 438 to 458 EUR across European listings, and about 597 CAD in Canada. That's a lot of money for a card this old, especially when newer budget GPUs exist. But the used market tells a different story, and plenty of people still hunt these down for compact gaming rigs or older mining setups.

So is the GTX 1070 Short Foundation good for gaming in 2025? For 1080p esports titles and older AAA games, yes. For anything modern at high settings, it's going to struggle. We'll break down exactly where it lands below.

Skip this card if you want to play modern AAA games at high settings or anything above 1080p. The GTX 1070 Short Foundation simply doesn't have the horsepower for 1440p gaming in newer titles, and the lack of ray tracing and DLSS support means you're missing out on features that are standard in 2025. If you're building a new system from scratch, put your money toward a used RTX 3060, RX 6600 XT, or even a GTX 1660 Super if you're on a tight budget. And if you need multiple display outputs, look elsewhere, this card only has a single HDMI port.

Should you buy the MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Short Foundation V330-090R? If you're building a compact budget rig and find one used for a fair price, it's a solid pick. Owners consistently praise the performance, the quiet fans, and the low power draw. The 8GB of VRAM means it can still handle 1080p gaming without choking on textures. And the small footprint makes it perfect for ITX cases where space is tight.

But at current retail prices, we can't recommend it. $375 for a Pascal card in 2025 is just too much. You're better off saving a bit more for a used RTX 3060 or RX 6600 XT, both of which offer dramatically better performance and modern features. The GTX 1070 Short Foundation was a great card in its day, and it's still a decent budget option, but only if the price is right.