Introduction

We review the ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3070 OC, which is the company's second fastest custom-design implementation of NVIDIA's latest performance-segment GPU, the other being ROG STRIX. The TUF Gaming brand received a spectacular upcycle with the GeForce RTX 30-series. We were extremely happy with the TUF Gaming RTX 3080 in our review. ASUS decided to use the same cooling solution on the new RTX 3070. The card combines a ruggedized metal body with a trio of Axial Tech fans and an airy cooling solution with vents at just the right places. There's also a nice factory overclock to be had.

The GeForce RTX 3070 is an important product for NVIDIA as it offers more than double the performance per dollar than the RTX 2080 Ti, and NVIDIA claims the RTX 3070 even beats it. This would mean the RTX 3070 is able to do the same things as the RTX 2080 Ti—maxed out gaming at 1440p with RTX-on, and 4K UHD gaming with reasonably high settings, including mid-tier settings of RTX. This would bring 4K UHD gaming to an even wider audience while also delivering high refresh-rate gaming to the 1440p and 1080p e-sports segments. At the heart of the RTX 3070 is the new 8 nm "GA104" silicon, which is much smaller than the "GA102" that powers the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. The RTX 3070 nearly maxes out the "GA104." NVIDIA cut costs where it could by giving this card the same 8 GB of 14 Gbps, 256-bit GDDR6 memory as the RTX 2070. For the full details on RTX 3070 technology and architecture, refer to our RTX 3070 Founders Edition article.



As we mentioned earlier, the TUF Gaming RTX 3070 OC in this review looks like an enthusiast-segment product for its price, and you could easily mistake it for the TUF Gaming RTX 3080 when installed. ASUS is combining the highly capable cooling solution with a GPU that has a typical board power of just 220 W at reference clocks, which at the factory-overclocked speeds, should barely bother this cooler. An overkill cooling solution that hopefully translates to lower noise levels.

The latest TUF Gaming board design involves a large aluminium fin-stack heatsink that's ventilated by a trio of Axial Tech fans. The PCB is shorter than the heatsink itself, and ASUS has given the card's metal backplate a large cutout for much airflow from one of the three fans go right through, a concept not unlike NVIDIA's "dual axial flow-through" industrial design for its RTX 30-series Founders Edition cards. Out of the box, the TUF Gaming RTX 3070 OC comes with factory-overclocked speeds of 1815 MHz GPU Boost (compared to 1725 MHz reference), which means the GPU may be pulling slightly more power than its stock 220 W rating. In this review, we take the ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3070 OC for a spin to tell you if paying a $40 premium over NVIDIA's $499 baseline price for the RTX 3070 makes sense.

Packaging

The Card

Subjectively, this is the best-looking product to wear the TUF Gaming badge by ASUS. The brand has come a long way, and this particular card sheds much of the "cheapness" associated with older generations of TUF Gaming graphics cards. It easily matches up to some of their premium designs. There's close to no illuminated bling, and an airy metal cooler shroud exposes as much of the heatsink underneath as possible.


Dimensions of the card are 30 x 14.5 cm.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and two HDMI 2.1. The DisplayPort 1.4a outputs support Display Stream Compression (DSC) 1.2a, which lets you connect 4K displays at 120 Hz and 8K displays at 60 Hz. Ampere can drive two 8K displays at 60 Hz with just one cable per display.

Ampere is the first GPU to support HDMI 2.1, which increases bandwidth to 48 Gbps to support higher resolutions, like 4K144 and 8K30, with a single cable. With DSC, this goes up to 4K240 and 8K120. NVIDIA's new NVENC/NVDEC video engine is optimized to handle video tasks with minimal CPU load. The highlight here is added support for AV1 decode. Just like on Turing, you may also decode MPEG-2, VC1, VP8, VP9, H.264, and H.265 natively, at up to 8K@12-bit.

The encoder is identical to Turing. It supports H.264, H.265 and lossless at up to 8K@10-bit.


ASUS includes a dual-BIOS feature with the TUF. The default BIOS is "performance", and the "quiet" BIOS is supposed to run a more relaxed fan curve with lower noise levels. On our card, both BIOSes are almost identical, though.


Unlike the NVIDIA Founders Edition card that uses the new 12-pin power input, ASUS sticks to industry standard PCIe power inputs. Together with the PCIe slot, this 8+8 power configuration is specified to supply up to 375 W of power.


The GeForce RTX 3070 does not support SLI. Only the RTX 3090 does, and it has very limited SLI support.

Teardown

The ASUS heatsink uses five heatpipes to keep the GPU cool. This part of the cooler also provides cooling for the memory chips and some VRM components.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.


An additional heatsink has been placed over the VRM components to the right of the GPU.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles or forum posts.



High-res versions are also available (front, back).