This Black Friday is shaping up to be a great time to grab a new gaming GPU upgrade, with the price of an MSI Shadow 2X Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 graphics card now sitting at just £449, its lowest ever price on Amazon UK. To put that price into context, Nvidia’s current UK MSRP for the RTX 5070 is £499, meaning you’re saving 10%, and while we’ve seen occasional drops to around the £470 mark for MSI cards such as this one, we’ve never seen the 5070 price drop this low before.
MSI Shadow 2X Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070
£479 £449
“This big and beautiful pixel pusher is full of features that delight and surprise.” – Read our review.
At £449, we can more readily forgive the RTX 5070’s main shortcoming, which is its comparative lack of VRAM. RTX 5070 cards might come equipped with the latest super-fast GDDR7 memory, running at an effective speed of 28Gbps, but there’s only 12GB of it, and the total bandwidth is limited by its comparatively narrow 192-bit memory interface. That’s still enough memory to run most of the latest games at 1920×1080 and 2560×1440 with decent settings, as we found in our RTX 5070 review. However, it falls over if you start to run really memory-intensive settings in some of the latest games, such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle with path tracing enabled.
That’s usually a problem for the RTX 5070 at its usual £499 price, as you can get a Radeon RX 9070 with 16GB of memory for a similar amount of money. However, at £449, an RTX 5070 makes much more sense. At this price, it’s in a similar league to an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB card, but with a more powerful GPU. It’s not a big upgrade if you already have an RTX 4070, but it gives you a decent speed boost if you’re still using an RTX 3070.
For example, we had the RTX 5070 running Forza Motorsport at 2560×1440 with an average of 72fps, while the RTX 3070 only managed 23fps, as it only has 8GB of VRAM. The GPU gives you a decent boost as well, with the Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord average jumping from 139fps on the 3070 to 212fps on our 5070 card at 2560×1440. Unlike Nvidia’s Ampere cards, the RTX 5070 also supports Nvidia’s full DLSS 4 tech suite, which includes multi frame gen.
And yes, multi frame gen isn’t a fix for a bad frame rate, and neither does it turn a RTX 5070 into a 4090, despite Nvidia’s claims. However, it is a useful tool in the box to smooth out your frame rate if you already have a decent starting point, which is great if you have a 240Hz monitor. For example, running Cyberpunk 2077 at 1920×1080 with the Ultra ray tracing preset, and with DLSS upscaling on Quality, the RTX 5070 averages a decent 71fps in our tests. This gives you enough headroom to enable frame gen, where it then averages a super-smooth 234fps at the top setting.
If you can spare an extra £90, then we recommend picking up this AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT deal instead, as it’s a much more powerful GPU. If you can’t stretch your budget that far, though, at £449, this MSI 5070 card is a genuinely good deal for the performance on offer. Grab one while you can, and before GPU prices rise next year.
