GIGABYTE’S RTX 3070 TI GAMING OC follows
the typical path of custom AIB designs,
rather than trying to blaze any new trails.
You get a larger card, improved cooling, a
slight factory overclock, and some other
cosmetic differences. It’s a conservative
approach, though Nvidia doesn’t allow
for much more than that. Unfortunately,
the biggest concerns with the RTX 3070
Ti remain; higher power use, minor
performance gains, only 8GB of memory,
and it’s sold out and overpriced at most
retailers. We’ve seen it all before and we
will see it again in the next round of GPUs.
The Gigabyte overclock only improved
performance by about two percent on
average compared to the reference
clocked Founders Edition, though that’s
not the only difference. Power use also
increased by about 20W over the reference
design, while GPU temperatures dropped
13C. The card wasn’t really any quieter,
but higher performance at lower
temperatures proves the overall quality
of the design. Alternatively, it proves that
Nvidia’s RTX 30-series Founders Edition
designs aren’t all that great.
Performance from the RTX 3070 Ti still
ranks just ahead of AMD’s competing RX
6800 but a bit behind the RX 6800 XT—
unless you run a game with lots of ray-
tracing effects like Control or Cyberpunk
2077, in which case the AMD cards tend
to fall on their face. Turning on DLSS inFactory overclocking only gets you so far
Gigabyte RTX 3070 Ti
Gaming OC
7
VERDICT Gigabyte RTX 3070 Ti Gaming OCDÉJÀ VU Good cooler; dual
HDMI ports; proven design.
DÉJÀ VU Minimal gains; high power use;
not enough VRAM.
$1200, http://www.gigabyte.comSPECIFICATIONSArchitecture Ampere GA104
Lithography Samsung 8N
Boost Clock 1830MHz
GPU Cores 6144
Memory 8GB GDDR6X
TFLOPS FP32 22.5
Bandwidth 608GBps
TDP 310W
Connectors 2x HDMI 2.1, 2x DisplayPort 1.4quality mode just adds insult to injury,
often improving performance by another
15 to 20 percent without a discernable loss
in image quality. There are now over 140
games that support DLSS, and Nvidia’s
latest DLSS 2.3 further improves the
algorithm to reduce the ghosting effect
that was sometimes visible with previous
versions. DLSS remains arguably the
best feature of Nvidia graphics cards, and
FSR doesn’t really compare.
The lack of VRAM isn’t just some
hypothetical problem. In the past few
months, we have seen multiple games
launch that very much want you to have
more than 8GB of memory at maximum
quality. For example, Battlefield 2042
and Halo Infinite can struggle at 1440p
ultra with an 8GB card. There are plenty
of other examples of games that exceed
8GB, and while it’s possible to drop
texture quality a notch to work around
this, is that something you want to do on a
graphics card nominally worth $600?
However, the biggest problem is
something that continues to affect all
graphics cards. Six months after it
officially launched, the GeForce RTX
3070 Ti remains questionable value
and one that’s hard to find in stock, with
most selling for extreme prices on eBay
or similar sites. Your best chance to
actually acquire any current generation
GPU without paying a massive premiumis to go out and buy a prebuilt PC, at which
point, it’s often luck of the draw as far as
the particular model of graphics card you
will be getting. It could be this Gigabyte,
or it might be an Asus, EVGA, MSI, or
some other brand.
The real conundrum at this point is
whether to wait or not. It’s coming up to 18
months since the RTX 3080 first arrived
and Nvidia typically follows an 18-24
month cycle between new architectures.
The continuing impact of the pandemic
and the resulting global supply chain
issues might delay the next-generation
RTX 40-series until later this year, but
if you can, waiting for better pricing and
availability is the sensible approach.
Then again, there’s always something
new coming down the pipeline. Like
thunder follows lightning and summer
follows spring, there will be future next-
generation GPUs after the RTX 40-series
and Lovelace architecture launch. If you
can find a Gigabyte RTX 3070 Ti card in
stock at a decent price—and really, that
goes for any current-generation RTX
30-series or RX 6000-series card—then
go ahead and upgrade. Then do it again in
another couple of years. That’s the life of
the enthusiast. –JARRED WALTONBest scores are in bold. All testing conducted with a Core i9-9900K, MSI MEG Z390 ACE, 2x16GB DDR4-3600
CL16, 2TB XPG 8200 Pro M.2 SSD, Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W. Scores are average framerates at
1920x1080/2560x1440, with ray tracing enabled in Control and Cyberpunk.Gigabyte
3070 TiRTX
3070 TiRX 6800 RX 6700 XT8 Game Average 100 / 77 98 / 75 95 / 73 82 / 60
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla 100 / 83 97 / 80 120 / 93 105 / 79
Borderlands 3 131 / 96 125 / 92 156 / 112 128 / 88
Control (DXR) 77 / 51 76 / 49 53 / 34 46 / 28
Cyberpunk 2077 (DXR) 52 / 34 51 / 33 30 / 20 29 / 18
Dirt 5 137 / 106 133 / 106 140 / 114 115 / 92
Horizon Zero Dawn 124 / 114 124 / 112 142 / 119 121 / 97
Metro Exodus 106 / 87 104 / 83 102 / 85 89 / 71
Red Dead Redemption 2 105 / 88 106 / 88 114 / 96 93 / 77BENCHMARKSin the lab
74 MAXIMU MPC FEB 2022