ASUS ROG Strix RTX 3070 – It’s Big, Beautiful and POWERFUL

ASUS, the over clockers dream brand, actually,  make that almost every gamers dream brand. Even more so the ROG STRIX flagship of ASUS. With no further introduction needed, the RTX 3070 ASUS Strix!

Specs

But what does 3070 specs look like against the 4K destroyer, the 3080 and the FIRST 8K GPU, the goliath of a card the 3090. So the 3070 has 8GB of GDDR6 ram, where the others offer 10GB of GDDR6X VRAM for the 3080, and 24GB of GDDR6X for the 3090. The 3070 also has 5888 Cuda cores where the 3080 has 8704 and the 3090, 10496.

Design

So the Strix has an all new design, and WOW this thing is gorgeous! I mean I would buy a vertical mount case just to show this card off! It has these beautiful silver lines. It combines a gaming and professional look into one card. You also have the Republic of gamers font written all over the silver plating. It has RGB that looks good, it might be over the top for some people but as you guys know, I love my RGB. Also the RGB lightning shines into the fan well too, SO COOL! ( HAPPY FACE)

This is so far the best looking card I have seen from the 30 series range GPUs. The backplate continues the ROG look with the ROG eye and the Republic of gamers branding on the silver accents. 

IO

Now taking a look at the back for the IO you get 

3x Display Ports v1.4a

1x HDMI 2.1 ports

Power 

It has dual 8pin power connectors that with our overclock, drew a max of 280W.  We would recommend at least a 600w power supply. But under gaming load we saw that it ran with 240W most of the time. So maybe you can get away with a 550w. 

Cooling solutions

The Strix has a 3 fan design featuring an axial tech fan design. These fans feature a smaller hub for larger blades and a barrier ring to increase downward air pressure. That directly translates into cooler a GPU. Strix cards are known for being cool, especially when pushed a little harder with an overclock.

For cooling, it did a decent job reaching a peak of 66 degrees under full load. With the fans running at 66 being 1600RPM. Our ambient room temps were a bit high though at around 28c. Idle temps were not bad being around 40c most of the time.

Looking at overclocking we were able to add an extra 100mhz to the core and 400 to the memory for a slight bump in performance. We saw an average of about 5% increase in the 3 games we tested. Which was AC Odyssey, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and F1 2020. But for most of our tests we kept the card stock, as it is much more stable and not everyone will OC the card once they have it.

Sound

So how loud is the Strix, I was quite surprised as the strix isn’t always known for being the softest sounding card. Our ambient room sound was around 42DB so we will use that as the bases for our test.  But Under load the Strix went to around 48DB at 66% fan speed and around 1600RPM,  which is very quiet, considering this was an open test bench. With 100% fan speed it went to around 68DB which is a little bit louder than the others but for the amount of cooling they provided it really was good

Benchmarks

As for the long awaited benchmarks. The system we used was paired with a i9 9900KF @ 5GHz and 64GB of memory running @ 3000MHZ. Also for the people who want a side by side visual comparison we will have one on our other channel WeDoBenchmarks linked in the description along with plenty more comparisons to come.

Now how good was the Strix? As we all know it will be good. (BIG SMILE) . The 3070 is an amazing card, even more so being the Strix version, I almost spent more time looking at the card than the game I was playing. But when I was playing, I was enjoying smooth, uninterrupted gameplay, no crashes, no random frame drops. Just pure BLISS. 

Our playgrounds for the 3070’s were big as we tested on 1080p,1440p and 4K. Just to see where this GPU fits in.

In all honesty this card shines in every one of those 3 resolutions. Ultra settings in all 3 resolutions was a possibility. 1080p works great if you play fast paced games which need very high refresh rates, maybe like a 1080p 360HZ display for this would be great. Do you have a 1440p 144HZ display, but need to drop to medium settings to get those frames? Well that’s a thing of the past as this runs butter smooth even on 1440p. 4K (SIGH)  the GPU destroyer, not anymore (HAPPY). 4K 60FPS is now possible and the best of all you won’t have to sell a kidney to get the GPU for playing at 4K.

Conclusion

The Strix, such a fan following it has, And with this I can see why. This card looks amazing and best off all it has the performance to go with the looks. I love this card. ASUS has really stepped up with the design as I felt the 20 series cards started looking washed out as they did not change the look from the 10 series at all. This is something else though, it’s in a league by itself. 

It will be more expensive than the competitors, but then again you do buy the ROG name with the card, is it worth the price difference? Well that’s a decision you will have to make for yourself.