Gigabyte RTX 3070 Gaming OC 8G Review

Conclusion

The Gigabyte RTX 3070 Gaming OC 8G is the third in a line of Gigabyte Gaming cards that has come through the OC3D offices since the launch of the new Nvidia Ampere GPUs.

When we think of Gigabyte we tend to, these days at least, think of the Aorus range of products. These have been wildly successful and rightfully so, with attention to detail and some design elements that rise them above the norm, particularly if you have a penchant for hardware which has plenty of flash and flair to go with the performance. So when the first Gigabyte Gaming card appeared we were a little surprised that they chose the more understated option for testing. However, it didn’t take very long for the qualities of the Gaming range to show up and whether it is in RTX 3080, RTX 3090, or here in RTX 3070 guise, the Gigabyte Gaming cards are extremely solid, tending to be the best of each type we’ve reviewed.

It all starts with the Windforce 3X cooler. This is a triple fan design that has been around for a while, with each successive iteration refining the formula. The Windforce 3X we have here has 3 80mm fans which counter-rotate to negate any air dead spots and provide maximum cooling efficiency. With graphene lubricated spindles they potentially have twice the lifespan of regular ball bearing fans yet, as our testing showed, do so quietly. We’re big fans of cool cards, but even bigger fans of quiet ones. Nothing spoils your gaming enjoyment quite like your system sounding like a vacuum cleaner the moment the going gets hot and heavy. Beneath those fans is a pure copper, direct contact GPU area and heatpipe setup that leads into the high density fins that give a huge surface area to keep the card cool under harsh loadings.

This excellent cooling performance marries up with the Nvidia GPU Boost technology to give the card more than enough thermal headroom for the cautious Nvidia drivers to boost the GPU hard. During testing we attained an average of a hair below 2 GHz on the core, which is frankly incredible. The results in our benchmarks echoed this with the Gigabyte Gaming regularly finding itself as the best performing of the three RTX 3070 cards we’ve reviewed so far during this launch week. It’s worth noting that we tested it with the dual BIOS in OC mode, but there is a silent BIOS option for those of you who would prefer to sacrifice a little performance for even lower noise levels. It’s more power efficient than the MSI card, and whilst it’s not as gorgeous to look at, it’s a tiny bit faster on average throughout our testing.

The new Nvidia Ampere GPUs have all been extremely impressive, slashing the high costs we saw from the Turing cards yet losing none of the performance heights in doing so, and the Gigabyte RTX 3070 Gaming OC might very well be the sweet spot between price and performance for gamers at all but the very highest resolutions. With a fantastic cooler, robust build quality and high performance it wins our OC3D Gamers Choice award.

The Gigabyte RTX 3070 Gaming OC has a MSRP of £539.

  

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