Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Gaming OC Review

Name: Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Gaming OC
Brand: GIGABYTE
Price: 650 USD

W1zzard

on Jun 25th, 2021,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: GIGABYTE

(21 Comments) »

Introduction

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3070 Ti has launched earlier this month to augment its RTX 30-series "Ampere" graphics card family, particularly as it faced unexpected competition from rival AMD in the high-end with the Radeon RX 6000 series "Big Navi" graphics cards. The RTX 3070 Ti is designed to fill a performance gap between the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080, letting NVIDIA better compete with the RX 6700 XT and RX 6800, which posed stiff competition to the RTX 3070. Cards from this segment are expected to offer maxed-out gaming at 1440p with raytracing enabled while retaining the ability to play at 4K UHD with reasonably good settings.

The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is based on the same GA104 silicon as the RTX 3070, but NVIDIA made two major changes. First, they maxed out the GPU, enabling all 6,144 CUDA cores as opposed to 5,888 on the RTX 3070. Second, they installed faster 19 Gbps GDDR6X memory instead of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory. The memory sub-system alone sees a significant 35% uplift in bandwidth. The memory size is still 8 GB.

Ampere comes with the second-generation of NVIDIA's path-breaking RTX real-time raytracing technology that combines raytraced effects, such as reflections, shadows, lighting, and global-illumination, with conventional raster 3D graphics to increase realism. Ampere combines second-generation RT cores with third-generation Tensor cores that accelerate AI, and faster Ampere CUDA cores.

The Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Gaming OC is a factory-overclocked custom-design variant of the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti that's not completely over the top like the Gigabyte AORUS Master, but, rather, seeks a balance between cooling, cost, overclock, and power draw. Clocked at a rated boost frequency of 1830 MHz, the card sits roughly in the middle of the frequencies available on custom designs.

Given current market conditions there is no MSRP available for the RTX 3070 Ti Gaming OC; it's currently sold at around $1200, roughly $50 above the cheapest RTX 3070 Ti cards available right now.

GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Cores	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
RX 5700 XT	$370	2560	64	1605 MHz	1755 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070	$340	2304	64	1410 MHz	1620 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060	$750	3584	48	1320 MHz	1777 MHz	1875 MHz	GA106	13250M	12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2070 Super	$450	2560	64	1605 MHz	1770 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Radeon VII	$680	3840	64	1400 MHz	1800 MHz	1000 MHz	Vega 20	13230M	16 GB, HBM2, 4096-bit
RTX 2080	$600	2944	64	1515 MHz	1710 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Super	$690	3072	64	1650 MHz	1815 MHz	1940 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060 Ti	$1150	4864	80	1410 MHz	1665 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6700 XT	$800	2560	64	2424 MHz	2581 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 22	17200M	12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2080 Ti	$1300	4352	88	1350 MHz	1545 MHz	1750 MHz	TU102	18600M	11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit
RTX 3070	$1050	5888	96	1500 MHz	1725 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3070 Ti	$1150	6144	96	1575 MHz	1770 MHz	1188 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
Gigabyte RTX 3070 Ti Gaming OC	$1200	6144	96	1575 MHz	1830 MHz	1188 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RX 6800	$1200	3840	96	1815 MHz	2105 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800 XT	$1400	4608	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3080	$1700	8704	96	1440 MHz	1710 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	10 GB, GDDR6X, 320-bit
RTX 3080 Ti	$2000	10240	112	1365 MHz	1665 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	12 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit

Packaging

The Card

Gigabyte's card uses a mix of black and gray highlights paired with a blocky industrial design. On the back, you'll find a high-quality metal backplate.

Dimensions of the card are 32 x 13 cm, and it weighs 1218 g.

Installation requires three slots in your system.

Display connectivity options include two 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.

This BIOS switch lets you toggle between the default "Performance" BIOS and a secondary "Silent" BIOS.

Power is drawn from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Along with slot power, this configuration supplies up to 375 W. I really like how Gigabyte has placed their power connectors near the corner of the card, unlike nearly all other RTX 3070 Ti cards.

The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti does not support SLI.

Teardown

Gigabyte's thermal solution uses seven heatpipes. The main heatsink not only cools the GPU, but also provides cooling for memory chips and VRM circuitry. The thermal pads on the VRM are 1.3 mm thick, and those on the memory are 2.0 mm thick.

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

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, videos or forum posts.