Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Founder Edition Review

The GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition graphics card from Nvidia manages to win the frame-rate battle at 4K resolution on occasion, and when it doesn’t, it comes close. It competes with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition and sometimes ties with it. The expertly constructed card isn’t the world’s fastest video card, but it annihilates practically every other card.

The GeForce RTX 3070 from Nvidia has done for 4K gaming what the GeForce GTX 970 did for 1080p gaming. It’s a fantastic card in its own right, giving a 4K performance that virtually matches the RTX 2080 Ti without burning a hole in your pocket. It is a de facto graphics card for most people due to its mix of low cost and good performance.

Features and Chipset:

The architecture is the same as the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 cards. It contains 5,888 CUDA cores distributed among 46 Streaming Multiprocessors, making ray tracing and DLSS applications significantly faster and more efficient. With a TGP (total graphics power) rating of 220W, the card also consumes a reasonable amount of power. The company’s AI Tensor Cores will power it, allowing it to blur or replace your background in video conversations.

There are other technologies like Nvidia Reflex and RTX IO that will directly benefit gamers. It will integrate with Microsoft’s future Direct Storage API to transport data from your PC’s hard drive to your graphics card. There are currently no games that use this storage API, but when they do, we should expect enormous performance improvements.

Specification:

The new Nvidia RTX 3070’s GA104 hardware has 5,888 CUDA cores, which is double the number of floating-point (FP32) units found in prior GeForce cards. A rebuilt RT Core can now handle more tasks in parallel, resulting in a more efficient overall ray tracing experience. With a rated boost frequency of 1,725MHz, the Nvidia RTX 3070 Founders Edition is a powerful graphics card. This is only about reference clocks. There are a few games where the card falls short of the RTX 2080 Ti, but they aren’t the ones that benefit from the increased video RAM.

Design:

One of the best-looking graphics cards I’ve seen is the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition. With only the soothing, delicate glow of white LEDs providing the sheepskin for the wolf hidden beneath, it’s the most mature and scary Nvidia has ever been. I’m reminded of the Apple Pro Display XDR when I look at Nvidia’s revised heatsink and cooling system.

The new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition is a fraction of the size and weight of earlier Turing cards. It comes with a redesigned 12-pin power connector and only one eight-pin-to-12-pin adapter to connect it to your power supply. The USB Type-C-like VirtualLink interface, which was prevalent on previous-generation Turing cards, is missing. It’s been removed from all Ampere cards so far, and we anticipate it’ll be gone permanently.

RTX 3070 Founder Edition:

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition looks a lot like the other Turing cards, but it’s a lot smaller. The mid-tier card is only 9.5 inches long (242mm), making it considerably easier to fit inside compact cases. This makes far more sense than a more powerful graphics card for folks with compact PC cases like the NZXT H1. The Founders Edition RTX 3070 graphics cards are among the most gorgeous we’ve ever seen. The TGP (total graphics power) is only 220W, compared to 320W for the RTX 3080, implying that temperatures will be easier to manage. Despite the lower power usage, you must still utilize Nvidia’s new 12-pin power connector, which makes no sense.

Thermal and Power Performance:

With an average tested Wattage of just 222W and a high of 262W, the Ampere Founders Edition runs cooler than the top-of-the-range Turing processor. That’s lower than the RTX 2080 Ti’s typical needs, which are far greater. We extracted a modest amount of largely unstable MHz from the GA104 chip, but it did not affect the card’s gaming performance.

4K gaming performance:

Nvidia has been adamant that this isn’t being marketed as a 4K gaming card by Jen-Hsun and his team, owing to the potential for backlash if the 16GB AMD RX 6800 XT is released. On the other hand, it’s still a strong performer on that front. Which, knowing the RTX 2080 Ti was the go-to 4K card of its generation, should come as no surprise.

However, neither card can always achieve 60 frames per second at a maximum of 4K game settings, so you’ll have to temper your need for ultra presets at all costs. As the settings decrease, you will likely have less of a requirement for a large pool of VRAM, so that becomes less of an issue as well. If it was ever true.

Pros:

Exceptional performance.
For the price, it was incredibly quick.
Great 4K gaming results with a beautiful design
The cooling system is innovative and does not overheat.
Today’s best bargain graphics card with outstanding ray tracing performance.

Cons:

12-pin power connector required.
Expect a rush on this card to mirror that of the RTX 3080, with the same inflated costs.

Conclusion:

Nvidia’s superbly constructed RTX 3070 Founders Edition is a nearly perfect graphics card, and it’s a fierce follow-up to its brilliant GeForce RTX 3080. Gamers looking for the greatest price-to-performance engine for high-resolution, high-refresh 1440p or 4K gaming.