MSI mistakenly fires up a ‘countdown’ to Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti GPU release that suggests February 20 launch rumors could be true

• Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti has been strongly rumored for a February 20 release
• MSI sent a countdown timer live by accident, seemingly confirming that date
• What we aren’t hearing, worryingly, is any word on the RTX 5070 and its launch date

Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti graphics card is increasingly looking set for a rumored February 20 launch date, just over a week from now – but we still haven’t heard anything on the grapevine about the vanilla RTX 5070’s release timeframe.

The latest piece of spillage regarding the on-sale date of the RTX 5070 Ti doesn’t come from a retailer – which have been the source of multiple leaks pointing to February 20 – but from one of Nvidia’s board-making partners.

It’s MSI to be precise, the French division of which sent a web page live (as Wccftech noticed) featuring its GeForce RTX 5070 Ti models along with a countdown that started with 10 days on the clock.

That happened yesterday, February 10, meaning the release date is February 20, in theory – although even with this leak, we can’t get carried away with it being conclusive, of course. Nothing’s ever fully set in stone until Nvidia actually announces the launch.

The web page was pretty vague – it didn’t show any of MSI’s models of the RTX 5070 Ti, or offer any info at all, apart from the assertion that the launch is nearing – and it’s now been taken down. That’s standard practice, of course, once a mistake like this has been made.

Analysis: What kind of mistake, though?

Well, we say it’s a mistake, but in this case, a 10-day countdown to the purported February 20 launch wouldn’t be an error as such – that was the design and intent of the web page, presumably. Unless the launch is, in actual fact, happening later than February 20, and MSI sent this countdown live early, by accident, but that seems unlikely.

What appears to be the case is that the French arm of MSI thought this countdown might be a good idea, fired up the web page, and quickly got told off, then took it down, but obviously I’m just guessing.

Whatever the case, with a French retailer also revealing the date of February 20 for the RTX 5070 Ti very recently, all signs are very much pointing to this as the day for the inevitable scramble to begin. Yes, stock levels of the RTX 5070 Ti will be watched like a hawk, given that this more affordable Blackwell GPU will surely be in greater demand than the RTX 5080 (and the RTX 5090 has always been a niche proposition).

As for the RTX 5070, the worry here, which I’ve expressed before, is that we aren’t hearing anything on the rumor mill about the launch of what should be a strong contender for our list of the best graphics cards.

There’s been a theory floating around for a while that the RTX 5070 Ti was coming first, but surely the RTX 5070 must be fairly close behind – Nvidia said both models would launch in February, after all.

So, not hearing a peep about the RTX 5070 is a little disconcerting, especially given the odd wisp of a rumor about a delay to March. Let’s hope that isn’t true, but AMD will doubtless be hoping the opposite, and that it’ll give Team Red’s new RX 9070 models arriving in March a better chance.

You might also like...

• RX 9070 GPU could theoretically be an RTX 5070 killer, I’m just worried that AMD may not go for Nvidia’s throat with pricing
• The end of the Nvidia RTX 4000 series is nigh – with the RTX 4070 expected to sell out in weeks
• Still worried RTX 5000 GPUs don’t have enough VRAM? Nvidia’s secret weapon is powerful AI texture compression, and it’s calmed some of my fears