Nvidia RTX 3070 Founders Edition Review

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A perfectly cut, high density foam core always speaks of the eye for detail the designers have, and can raise an affordable product into a very premium feeling item. We won’t pretend the RTX 3070 is cheap, although it’s magnificently affordable given its performance, but in this packaging it could cost a grand or more and we wouldn’t have been shocked.

  

The RTX 3070 FE itself will be familiar to you if you read our reviews of the 3080 FE card. A very smooth and sleek design with plenty of fins to help increase the surface area for cooling, with two fans keeping the air flow constant. The ‘inside’ fan has a vent at the back to allow airflow to the top half of your case, whilst the one at the bracket end is used for GPU cooling and also exhausting that hot air out of the back bracket, rather than spilling out into your case.

  

The rear of the RTX 3070 FE is an exercise in minimalism, with a single backplate only showing the through hole that has been a feature of all the latest RTX cards we’ve reviewed, whether from Nvidia or partners. Anything that helps stop your graphics card becoming a wall in the middle of your case and let some air reach the upper half, has to be a good thing.

  

Power is a 12 pin PCIe, that actually uses a single 8 pin PCIe adaptor. We don’t know why either. However, getting RTX 2080 Ti performance from a single 8 pin shows how efficient the latest Ampere GPU is.

  

Although the power connector is a strange shape, or rather an uncommon number of pins, Nvidia supply an adaptor cable so you can be up and running instantly.

  

Outputs are the standard Nvidia selection of three DisplayPort 1.4s and an HDMI 2.1. The HDMI is the big change, allowing 8K60 and significantly higher refresh rates at lower resolutions thanks to the increased bandwidth.

  

Size is always difficult to get across without any sense of scale to compare things to, so here is the RTX 3070 on top of the RTX 3080. It’s a svelt thing and perfect if your case internals are somewhat limited in available space.