Asus TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Super OC
The best of the Super bunch.
The original RTX 4070 was one of the better releases of the Ada Lovelace RTX 40-series generation. It offered a leap in intergenerational performance, DLSS 3 with Frame Generation, excellent performance per watt and its price was more on the acceptable side, that’s if spending near enough to $1,200 sat right with you. It didn’t for many.
The RTX 4070 Super lands at the same RRP means you get a decent improvement in performance for the same money. In isolation, that makes the RTX 4070 Super a more compelling option than the already quite good RTX 4070, for the same amount of money.
The RTX 4070 Super gets arguably the most significant specification upgrade of the three newly released Supers. It still includes the AD104 GPU, but it gets an upgrade from the 5,888 shaders and 36MB of L2 cache of the 4070 non-Super to 7,168 shaders and 48MB of L2 cache. That’s more than a 20% increase and it puts it closer in specification to the end-of-life RTX 4070 Ti, making the latter all but irrelevant.
It gets a mild 20W increase in TDP, up to 220W. The boost clocks of both the Super and non-Super are the same at 2,475MHz. The Asus TUF RTX 4070 Gaming OC that we have on hand for our review increases that clock to an impressive 2,565MHz. Our sample was able to hold a little higher than this, at 2,690Mhz under a sustained load.
The Asus RTX 4070 Super TUF is outwardly similar to many of the TUF cards we’ve had in our hands over the last few years. It’s a little more compact than the cards with the really big TUF coolers but this smaller version (though it still takes up three slots) is easily enough to tame the 220W TDP of the RTX 4070 Super. It is a very quiet and cool running card, hardly being audible at any stage of our testing. We like the subtle but rather industrial look of the card too. It gives the impression that it’s built to last.
Performance wise, we were perhaps hoping for some results to match that whopping 20%+ increase in shader power over the RTX 4070, but the average performance increase is more like 10-15%. Still, that’s not bad at all, and it’s easily enough to put it well clear of the AMD RX 7800 XT, albeit that card is getting consistently cheaper over time.
The only real obstacle for the RTX 4070 Super is its non-Super sibling. Stocks of the latter are expected to dry up fairly quickly, but with some falling under $900, it’s hard to look past that. That won’t last forever, and in time the RTX 4070 Super will fall to those levels, at which time, it may end up as the best card of the entire RTX 40 generation in terms of frames per dollar and performance per watt.
It’s still a relatively pricey affair, but it sits near enough to the sweet spot of this generation. Add to that Asus’s supremely quiet running and it’s easy to recommend spending the extra $70 or so dollars on it over the base RTX 4070 Supers.
VERDICT
THe RTX 4070 Super is the highlight of this round of Super releases, and this Asus TUF makes it even better.
Chris Szewczyk
“The RTX 4070 Super gets arguably the most significant specification upgrade of the three newly released Supers.”