Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition
Ampere impresses again.
The Nvidia RTX 3070 is the third Ampere card to be released and it’s a card we’ve really been looking forward to. The 3080 really surprised us with its intergenerational performance jump and relative value for money. By most standards though, it’s still a very expensive card that’s priced out of reach of most gamers. The RTX 3070 though is available for under $1,000. That’s around half the price of the outgoing 2080 Ti. Since the RTX 3070 purportedly offers performance around the 2080 Ti level, that’s an incredible doubling of ‘frames per dollar’. We have the RTX 3070 Founders Edition on hand for review. Does it deliver on its promise? Of course the RTX 3070 includes all the key Ampere features including improved ray tracing support,
Broadcast, Reflex and G-Sync Ultimate.
The RTX 3070 is the first card built with the GA104 GPU. It packs in 5,888 shader cores running at a boost clock of 1,730MHz. These are joined by 46 Ray Tracing cores and 184 Tensor cores. It’s paired up with 8GB of GDDR6 that runs at 14Gbps over a 256 bit bus for a total of 448GB/s of memory bandwidth. The TDP is 220W which is far more palatable than the 350W of many RTX 3080s. It comes with the same single 12-pin power connector found on the 3080 and 3090 FE cards. It still has the rather odd mid card placement that won’t impress clean build purists. It’s also a questionable requirement at all given that it’s effectively an extension cable, with a single 8-pin connector input.
The card itself is very compact and aesthetically simple. It takes up exactly two slots, in terms of both width and height which will appeal to builders of compact systems. Its length matches up perfectly with an ATX motherboard. The cooler is similar to the ones found on the 3080 and 3090 cards, but scaled down size. There are triple DisplayPort 1.4a ports onboard, and a single HDMI 2.1 port with support up to 8K.
What really matters is how it performs, and we’re happy to say, the 3070 does a stellar job. We found it to be only slightly behind the RTX 2080 Ti, a card that went for twice the price, so by that measure alone, the 3070 is a fantastic card. It’s a perfect high refresh rate 1080p or 1440p card. It’s also capable of 4K gaming, though 8GB is starting to be a limiting factor in some games at their most taxing settings.
As we continually note with Nvidia cards, the base clock is all but irrelevant unless you want to run Furmark in a case with zero airflow. Our sample settled into a long term boost clock of between around 1890MHz to 1940MHz at 73 C. At this default setting, we saw the card pull a peak of 227W. This is a full 100W less than the 3080 Founders Edition.
“What really matters is how it performs, and we’re happy to say, the 3070 does a stellar job. We found it to be only slightly behind the RTX 2080 Ti, a card that went for twice the price.”
At 220W, the TDP of the card is back to more acceptable levels and the 3070’s compact cooler doesn’t need to work anywhere near as hard to keep cool. We saw a peak temperature of 74 C. That will be a bit higher in a closed case, but we were very happy with the effective combination of cooling capability and low noise levels. Custom cards will likely be very cool and quiet.
As is the case with the other Ampere cards we’ve tested, there isn’t a lot of overclocking headroom. You will gain a bit from overclocking the memory, but the card runs into its power limits quickly. Partner cards will likely feature BIOSes that allow for less restricted power limits.
In conclusion, the 3070 goes very close to the RTX 2080 Ti at half the price. This is simply incredible. Having said that, the pricing is perhaps a little too high given that high end 3070 cards are the same price as the entry level 3080s which are a big step up in performance. Availability also remains a concern for the entire range. Then there’s the elephant in the room which is the pending release of the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series. At the time of writing we only had AMD’s performance measurements on hand. We’ll reserve judgment until we do our own independent testing, but the competing models could end up being very strong indeed. Unless you’re particularly interested in a unique Nvidia feature such as G-Sync or DLSS in a particular game, we’d recommend holding off on your buying decision until RX 6000 cards are released. Wherever the dust settles, the consumer is the winner. RTX 3070 buyers won’t be disappointed. Don’t forget there’s the imminent release of 3060 cards to look forward to as well. It’s a fantastic time to be in the market for a new GPU.
CHRIS SZEWCZYK
The RTX 3070 competes well with the 2080 Ti at half the price, but we’d suggest waiting a little bit longer before making a decision.