Wow... just wow... and not in a good way. I expected the power consumption and thermal load to drastically increase due to the usage of GDDR6X, but I didn't expect that even with the addition of this exotic memory and a shader count increase, we'd have such minimal improvement in performance over the original vanilla 3070. That concern about the card throttling under some workloads due to GDDR6X's extremely high power consumption causing it to run into the power limit still lingers, and I think it might end up being a reality to many owners of this card, as it is for many of us RTX 3090 owners.
Were I in the market for a GPU in this segment, I'm not gonna lie: I straight up wouldn't buy it. The Radeon RX 6800 is a better product in my eyes, especially given NVIDIA's refusal to allow us to have BIOS editors or advanced configuration settings to fix their mess (i.e. increase the power limit enough for the memory to stop suffocating the GPU ASIC), all while AMD has advanced in-driver hardware control settings. I like my hardware to be manageable, and Ampere is everything but that.
A small price reduction on the original would have made it a much better product to compete with RDNA 2 offerings in both segments surrounding it, imho, even in today's absurd market conditions.
