Nvidia Geforce Rtx 2070 Founders Edition Review
Check out the Founders Edition design section of our RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti review if you want deeper details. The product has been added to the comparison bar, adding up to 3 products. Product information are for reference only and subject to change at any time.
The cooler works fairly well and the fans are no louder than other gaming laptops. It’s quite the beast at 7.5 lbs so don’t plan on carrying this around easily a lot. What’s more, there didn’t seem to be much evidence of my processor becoming a bottleneck at lower resolutions, either, making the gigabyte gtx 1060 3gb much better suited to your average mid-range gaming PC than its 2080 siblings.
Even the heat sink on this card is mammoth – side-by-side with the last-gen GTX 1080 Gaming-Z, it’s significantly larger and heavier, but it does ensure cool operation. Even with boost clocks hitting 1920MHz with its factory overclock in place, the Gaming-Z card sat below 70 degrees Celsius. Bearing in mind the substantial 445mm2 die-size, that’s not bad at all. All four cards seem ideal for 1440p gaming, even at max settings in modern games. You can obviously adjust the settings down to improve frame rates for a 144MHz monitor setup or get usable frame rates with all the eye candy enabled.
But, at the moment, there are probably better options out there for your money. We felt that itdid make sense to include on this list, though, because if the standard RTX 2070s were to drop in price, this would be a good option to watch. MSI’s ARMOR edition cards usually sit in the bottom price range of a GPU series and so if there is a price drop, there’s a good chance that this one could come down to a much more reasonable level. However, the MSI Gaming Trio comes in at just under $540, making ~$40 more expensive than both the Gigabyte RTX 2070 SUPER Windforce OC and the Zotac RTX 2070 SUPER Twin fan. And, since it doesn’t have a higher factory clock speed than either of those options and its cooling configuration is on par with the Windforce OC, the $40 difference you’re paying is really for the RGB lights. While the ZOTAC RTX 2070 Mini is the cheapest RTX 2070 on the market, ZOTAC’s RTX 2070 SUPER Mini is probably the best option if you’re looking to build a powerful mini-ITX gaming PC.
It was always going to be difficult to give the ROG the top performance position due to its lower out-of-the-box clock speed. However what we are comfortable in saying is that the ROG takes the top spot when considering a solid all round option. Fantastic cooling which was both the coolest and quietest, a fantastic meaty design that boosts the aesthetics of any rig and the ability to manually overclock very efficiently. Asus’s brilliant heatsink and fan configuration overclocking the Rog becomes much more forgiving and achievable at high levels.
If the RTX 2070 Super is a pocket RTX 2080, then the RTX 2060 Super is a pocket RTX 2070. This means the TDP has gone up from 160W on the 2060 vanilla to 175W on the 2060 Super – the smaller jump being since both cards use the same TU106 GPU – as these are the same Turing GPUs and NVIDIA’s energy efficiency hasn’t improved at all here. The drawback here is that with RTX 2080-like performance comes RTX 2080-like power consumption. The TDP of the card is 215 Watts, exactly the same as the RTX 2080 and 40W higher than the RTX 2070 vanilla. On paper, NVIDIA’s energy efficiency actually takes a small hit here because of this – it’s less than RTX 2080 performance for the same TDP – which is in part a consequence of using higher clockspeeds.
It’s the ideal option if you need higher framerates for a 120Hz or 144Hz gaming monitor. It’s time for RTX 2060 to finally show why it’s a worthy contender for your next GPU. At $349, it’s significantly cheaper than gigabyte gtx 1060 3gb, which goes for $499. With a simple eye test, we can tell that the rough 10% difference is noticeable, but that it also depends on the game. It was somewhat expected that RTX 2060 would perform better in those types of games, but it’s also interesting that RTX 2070 doesn’t increase its performance there either.
Destiny 2 performed a lot better on both the 2060 Super and 2070 Super than AMD’s 5700 series in terms of raw frame rates, but Division 2 seems to be better optimized for AMD’s cards. I ran both at maxed-out settings, and all of the cards handled well. Likewise, the Fire Strike Extreme benchmark performed far better on both the 5700 XT and 5700 than Nvidia’s cards. Both of AMD’s new cards also support PCIe 4.0, but you’ll need a new motherboard and AMD’s third-generation Ryzen CPUs to see the benefit from that right now. While PCIe 4.0 doubles the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0, this isn’t really required at current resolutions and refresh rates, and it will become far more important in the future when resolutions push beyond 4K.