Gigabyte RTX 4070 Windforce 12G OC Review
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The Gigabyte Windforce packaging is certainly attention grabbing. Not only do we think that the design on the front would actually make for an awesome custom case, but the contrast between orange and green on the side is hard to ignore, for good or ill.
The Windforce cooler has always been famed for its triple fan design as well as the thinness of the fan shroud and chunky heatsink. The latest RTX 4070 design is no exception. Plenty of cooling capacity.
The addition of a ventilation hole in the backplate was one of the real breakthroughs in recent times. It just makes perfect sense. Most cases are designed with things at the front for fans and/or drives, which leave a graphics card working as a wall between the cool air taken in at the bottom of your system and the needs of your CPU cooler at the top. By having a vent, this wall is eliminated. However, a few recent cards are cutting this hole down to barely a sliver, so we like Gigabyte sticking with it in full width mode.
Like many of the Windforce cards the RTX 4070 is dominated by a high-fin count heatsink bristling from beneath a sparse shroud. Plenty of room to get the hot air away from the card.
We can’t overstate how useful the Gigabyte decision to stick to an 8pin PCIe power input is. Just think how many people have a PSU with native 12pin power support, versus the vast majority with regular PCIe power. It guarantees you need to buy neither a new PSU nor an ugly adaptor cable. Excellent.
For a while we saw Nvidia cards with an equal split of HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, but the RTX 4070 continues the modern trend of a single HDMI and a triumvirate of DisplayPorts.
