Nvidia RTX 3070 Founders Edition Review

Nvidia RTX 3070 Founders Edition Review

Introduction

We might be reaching the end of October with all the chilly weather that entails – unless you’re one of our antipodean cousins – but the hardware world is heating up. Not only are we getting close to the launch of the next generation of consoles, but as anyone who has been following the Nvidia, Ampere reviews will know, the PC gaming master race is also currently white-hot.

After the massive success of the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080, today we’re looking at the middle card in the Ampere range, the RTX 3070 Founders Edition. If the RTX 3090 made every game weep under its insane performance, and the RTX 3080 smashed the RTX 2080 Ti for significantly less investment, then the RTX 3070 will combine those two things to make anyone who has purchased an RTX 2080 Ti weep for their bank account. If you doubt the increase in performance and reduction in price the Ampere cards bring then let’s not beat around the bush. For nothing like the money of even an RTX 2080, the RTX 3070 matches the RTX 2080 Ti in performance. Usually, we wait to give away the results. Still, we already knew the Ampere cards were incredible and the RTX 3070 carries this on, halving the cost of you getting the performance of the previous generation flagship.

If you’re coming here post-launch, it’s worth bearing in mind that we can only write about and judge things based upon what we know empirically and as we haven’t yet seen the new Radeon, much less tested it, it doesn’t have any bearing upon our conclusion.

Eyes down for a full house.

Technical Specifications

Cross-generational comparisons are always curious. We know that everything gets faster as time goes on, and whilst we appreciate that Nvidia wants to show the RTX 3070 FE in the best light by comparing it to the RTX 2070 FE, if it were our company we’d be shouting from the rooftops about how the real world performance matches the significantly more powerful RTX 2080 Ti. Given that the boost and memory clocks are very close between the two x070 cards, it shows how much has been unleashed from the GA104 GPU when compared to it’s Turing brother.

Nvidia RTX 3070 Founders Edition Review  
Nvidia RTX 3070 Founders Edition Review Â