Palit GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GameRock OC Review

Name: Palit GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GameRock OC
Brand: Palit

W1zzard

on Jun 9th, 2021,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: Palit

(9 Comments) »

Introduction

The Palit GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GameRock OC is the company's most premium custom-design implementation of NVIDIA's latest high-end graphics card launch. The RTX 3070 Ti and last week's RTX 3080 Ti launch form part of an attempt to refresh the high-end segment in the face of competition from AMD and its "Big Navi" Radeon RX 6800 series. This graphics cards segment targets those wanting maxed out gaming at 1440p with raytracing, but also the ability to play at 4K UHD with reasonably good details. NVIDIA already has such a SKU in the RTX 3070, which was embattled by the RX 6700 XT and RX 6800 and is possibly what the RTX 3070 Ti launch is all about.

NVIDIA created the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti out of the same GA104 silicon as the RTX 3070 by maxing it out. You hence get all 6,144 CUDA cores physically present on the chip, compared to just 5,888 on the RTX 3070. Another major change is memory, with NVIDIA opting for fast 19 Gbps GDDR6X memory over 14 Gbps GDDR6. This results in a significant 35% increase in memory bandwidth over the RTX 3070. The memory size remains 8 GB, though. Wrapping things up are the slightly higher GPU clock speeds. The resulting product, NVIDIA believes, should restore competition to the sub-$600 market segment by successfully challenging the RX 6800.

Palit bolstered the RTX 3070 Ti with its highest factory overclock, at 1845 MHz boost frequency compared to the 1770 MHz reference. The GameRock OC series from Palit always represented over-the-top designs, and this card is no exception. A neatly executed "icebox" pattern tops the cooler shroud, which isn't unlike the G.SKILL Trident Royal memory modules. This element is illuminated with addressable RGBs.

At this time, Palit is unable to provide an MSRP for the GameRock OC. I'd estimate it'll end up around $1350 in the free market, which is $50 higher than the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition.

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	$900	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	$1300	4864	80	1410 MHz	1665 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6700 XT	$1000	2560	64	2424 MHz	2581 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 22	17200M	12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2080 Ti	$1400	4352	88	1350 MHz	1545 MHz	1750 MHz	TU102	18600M	11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit
RTX 3070	$1300	5888	96	1500 MHz	1725 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3070 Ti	$1300 MSRP: $600	6144	96	1575 MHz	1770 MHz	1188 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
Palit RTX 3070 Ti GameRock OC	$1350	6144	96	1575 MHz	1845 MHz	1188 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RX 6800	$1400	3840	96	1815 MHz	2105 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800 XT	$1700	4608	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3080	$1500	8704	96	1440 MHz	1710 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	10 GB, GDDR6X, 320-bit
RTX 3080 Ti	$2200	10240	112	1365 MHz	1665 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	12 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit

Packaging

The Card

As mentioned earlier, the highlight with the RTX 3070 Ti GameRock OC is its crushed ice design that dominates the top of the cooler shroud. It lights up in any color and looks really groovy, particularly when mounted vertically in your case. The PCB is barely 60% of the length of the card, so a significant amount of airflow goes right through cutouts on the backplate.

Dimensions of the card are 30 x 13.5 cm, and it weighs 1410 g.

Installation requires three slots in your system.

Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and one 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.

Using this RGB header, you can connect external RGB circuitry to the graphics card.

Power is drawn from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Along with slot power, this configuration supplies up to 375 W.

The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti does not support SLI.

Teardown

The RTX 3070 Ti GameRock OC is very easy to disassemble. Simply undo a bunch of screws from the backplate, and the cooler assembly comes out in one clean piece. The thermal pads for memory are 1.0 mm thick, as are those on the VRM.

The cooler uses a nickel-plated copper base to pull heat form the GPU, while an aluminium base plate pulls heat form the memory and VRM. Six 6-mm-thick heat pipes running through the aluminium fin-stack make indirect contact with the base.

The backplate is made out of metal and lacks any thermal pads, letting it participate in the cooling.

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.