The new series of Nvidia video cards has both impressed and drawer. RTX 3080 delivers monologically higher performance than the top generation from the previous generation at a significantly lower price, but is hopeless to get hold of. Trouble with the choice of capacitors has also led to unstable clock speeds on some third-party cards.
It has our pure roller coaster.
Now the little brother RTX 3070 is here. We have had to sharpen our skills on MSI’s Gaming X Trio version of the card, which you can pick up with you for around NOK 7,200 at the time of writing. Leaks from Nvidia have hinted that there will be far more of these to get at launch than RTX 3080, but it remains to be seen.
The MSI RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio, like all other 3070 cards, has 8 GB of GDDR6 video memory at 14 GB / s, and support for PCIe 4.0. The card has 5888 CUDA cores and a power consumption of 240 watts, which is fed in through two 8-pin connectors. The boost clock speed is 1830 MHz out of the box.
The hope is that the RTX 3070 will be able to handle the RTX 2080 Ti performance at a mid-range price. And it almost does. But is the difference so small that it’s just as easy to buy the RTX 3080 instead? And what about the upcoming AMD video cards?
Me undersøkjer.
Design
The Gaming X Trio cooler is almost identical to the RTX 3090 video card I tested a while ago. The appearance is difficult to see any difference, and it is not as much smaller as one might expect. The video card is actually only 0.2 centimeters shorter than the RTX 3090 variant.
You can read more about our design reviews in our RTX 3090 test.
With a weight of 1450 grams and a length of 33.2 centimeters, it is a very short. This means large cooling capacity, but potentially trouble for those with little space in the cabinet. As always, it is important to check that one can actually get it in before one buys.
Take out the scale and try your hand.
Yting
Our tests show that the difference between RTX 3070 and the previous generation varies somewhat. RTX 2080 Ti is the most comparable competitor. RTX 2070 is of course parked with a good margin, and even in 1080p where the processor is a clear bottleneck.
They can see test data from eight different games as well as some synthetic tests on the next page. In 1080p there are few differences in other than the newest games, but in 1440p the RTX 3070 proves to be a strong competitor.
It depicts that one hardly needs more than the upcoming RTX 3060 card if one is not going to go over 1080p.
With some adjustments to the settings, the RTX 3070 should be an excellent card for those who want to play on a 1440p screen with a 144 hertz panel. It does quite well in 4K too, and climbs above the magic 60 limit in most of our test games. In Control, it seems right enough that there is a little too little video memory in 4K, but below 4K, 8 GB should be enough for years to come.
When it comes to radiation tracking, Nvidia has not delivered on the huge leap that they promised, and it still costs far too much performance to be worth using, I think. For example, a higher frame rate in 1440p with everything at max (without beam tracking), than in 1080p with beam tracking on. Then a higher resolution is preferable.
In sum, the RTX 3070 is in practice a slightly weaker RTX 2080 Ti at around 60 percent of the price. If our test card had been closer to the launch price of Nvidia, it would have been a fantastic purchase, but with taxes and fees, the situation is a little different in this country than in other cities. Now it must also be mentioned that the RTX 2080 Ti had a rather ridiculous price itself.
With American prices, the RTX 3070 would be what you get by far the most value for money in the Ampere series, but the effect is not quite as great here. When the RTX 3080 variant of this only costs 2000 more here in Norway, you get the same number of FPS for the money with it in 4K. There we talk about just as many FPS per krone with 3070 as 3080. Therefore, I would like to see this for a thousand bucks less. But now it is probably 1440p and 1080p that are most important for those who buy this, and there it is difficult to beat RTX 3070. It crushes RTX 2080 Ti when it comes to FPS per krone, and the previous 70 card is miles behind .
Now that AMD’s upcoming RX 6800 card will probably be more expensive than this, the RTX 3070 can be the new winner in the middle class – although it is a bit too much to call this a middle class when we are all up to seven notes.
The tests were performed on a PC with an i7-8700k processor clocked at 4.9 GHz, a fast nVME SSD and 16 GB with 4.4 GHz DDR4 memory.
Overclocking
In recent generations, it has been possible to extract some extra power from the cards by means of manual overclocking. From what I have experienced with the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, it seems that there is less to go on this time.
New this year is that a protection for the memory bandwidth means that the card does not always crash when overclocking memory, but that the performance rather goes down. This has happened before, but it has become even more demanding to find the right balance between overclocking the memory speed and the clock speed.
The RTX 3070 card is by far the worst judgment on this. There are large variations from game to game what I get out of overclocking, where The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt gets the most effect out of overclocking. There I increased the frame rate in 4K from 63 to 67, ie around six percent.
In Middle-Eath: Shadow of War, the difference was no more than three percent, and in Horizon Zero Dawn, the average frame rate went ned then I overclock. It happened itself without memory overclocking. In the synthetic tests, the results were about the same as without overclocking, so therefore there does not seem to be much point in spending time overclocking with this.
Nvidia has introduced its own overclocking tool to GeForce Experience no, which can try to calculate how much one can overclock the card. The tool came up with a proposal for an increase in clock speed of 135 MHz, but it was of course extremely unstable. So I do not have much faith in that function. The overclocking only became stable when I got it down to 60 MHz above normal boost clock speed, with 600 MHz extra on the memory clock, and the current limit increased to 104 percent.
Not very impressive, that is. But it probably has something to do with the fact that Nvidia has already squeezed out what they can from the video card, because the Gaming X Trio card boosts up to 1980 MHz out of the box. With overclocking, the card heats up to 2040 MHz.
At the same time, this MSI card has a lower power limit than the Founders Edition card, so I’m not entirely sure if this is the card for those who want to overclock. We have also received an RTX 3070 card from ASUS TUF, which we will return with a test of.
Power consumption, temperature and noise level
When it comes to power efficiency, I just have to bend in the dust for Nvidia here. After a week of use, the card has never pulled more than 236 watts out of the wall without overclocking. Then the highest temperature I have seen is 63 degrees, with a fan speed of 1350 revolutions per minute.
This is a brilliant result. Under full load, the fans produce around 32 decibels, and it is almost completely silent. With the cabinet left, I hear nothing. As long as one does not play demanding games, the fans will not spin at all.
With overclocking, the maximum consumption went up to 249 watts, and the temperature up to 64 at most. The fans crawled up to 1400 rpm, which meant that they produced 34 decibels at most. Not exactly huge differences here, that is.
There is little doubt that MSI has done its job.
Conclusion
This is not the best time to be quick on the trigger with video card purchases. AMD is about to launch its new cards, and seems to stand out as a real competitor to Nvidia. At the same time, the price of the RX 6800 is probably a bit too high compared to the RTX 3070, so I imagine that RTX 3080 owners should sweat more than those who want to order the RTX 3070.
In any case, it may be wise to wait a bit until there are tests of the RX 6800. We do not know what the Norwegian prices are yet, and some of the third-party cards for the RTX 3070 are quite expensive.
If it is completely the same, Nvidia will be ahead with some better technology, with for example the Nvidia Broadcast App, Nvidia Reflex, DLSS, 8K support in Shadowplay and (probably) better performance in beam tracking. But without knowing the price and gameplay, it is impossible to say what will be the right choice yet.
At the same time, there is no doubt that the RTX 3070 is a very powerful video card, and especially for those who want to play in 1440p. It also helps that MSI’s cooler is absolutely superb. With low temperatures, low noise and high clock speeds, you get a really good card here. Still, it is a bit disappointing that one is not allowed to give more than 104 percent power to the card. It limits how much one can overclock.
Most likely, the RTX 3070 is a card that is hard to beat for AMD. We come back with an overall test on all the cards when they are out, and it is possible we adjust the grades a bit then.
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