The New King Of Price To Performance – Gigabyte Gaming RTX 3070 OC

So the launch of the RTX 3080 and 3090 was very shaky, with scalpers buying up most of the GPUs, then the crashing scenario which everyone thought it was the capacitors that was used, but ended up being driver issues.That being said a lot of us waited for the 3070’s launch. Hoping that it will go much smoother. Now the time has finally come. This is the GPU that most of us will probably go for. And our first look at one will be of the Gigabyte RTX 3070 Gaming OC.  Expected MSRP is $500 but with limited stock we will have to wait and see.

Specs

But first let’s take a look at what the 3070 has to offer as it’s not completely the same as the 3080 and 3090 with some major hardware differences. So the 3070 has 8GB of GDDR6 ram, but the 3080 and 3090 both use GDDR6X. The 3070 also has 5888 Cuda cores where the 3080 has 8704 and the 3090 has almost double at 10 496.

Design

Moving on to the design, the 3070 Gaming OC has a very similar look to the 3080 from gigabyte. I must say they did fix some things on the design side that I didn’t like too much, so good job there for Gigabyte. As you can see, the weird notch indent is now gone and gives you a more straight line design. Also all the fans are the same size, where the 3080 had one fan that was slightly smaller than the other ones. 

The rest of the design is almost identical. You still get the RGB gigabyte logo with the RGB stripe. It’s a shame they didn’t fix the jittery transition of the rainbow flow on the stripe though. The backplate does flow very nicely with the rest of the card and It almost looks seamless where it connects to the shroud.

It still has those sharp gaming edge designs, with a hint of silver on the shroud to match the backplate, with the rest of the card being black. 

Luckily this card is not as big as the 3080. This is a 2 slot design, with a much smaller footprint. 

The 3070 has a dimension of L=286 W=115 H=51 mm

Where the 3080 was              L=320 W=129 H=55 mm.

So almost 4cm shorter than the 3080. Making it much more suited for micro ITX builds as well. 

IO

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

2x Display Ports v1.4a

2x HDMI 2.1 ports

Power 

It has a 6pin and a 8pin power connector that with our overclock, drew a max of 280W.  We would recommend at least a 600w power supply. Although in gaming we saw it peeking more around the 240W range. So if the rest of your system isn’t too crazy spec, you might get away with a 550W PSU. But just to be safe, stay with a 600W.

Cooling solutions

As for the cooling in the gigabyte, the fans have been smartly tuned, so the 2 outside fans rotate counter clockwise, while the centre fan rotates clockwise, this is to reduce turbulence. The fans also have a unique fan blade, where the fan scoops up the air and splits the air up and guides it onto the GPU . The card does also feature a dual BIOS mode. 1 is OC mode and the other a silent mode. The system does need a restart after this has been changed.

For cooling, it did a decent job reaching a peak of 73c under full load. With the fans running at 83% being 2200RPM. 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 140mhz to the core and 500 to the memory for a slight bump in performance. We used EVGA Precision X to one click overclock it as well. That gave us 120MHz to the core and 250MHz to the memory. Do note that we ran most of the games on stock as the card is OC out of the box and it is a lot more stable that way.

Sound

So how loud is the Gigabyte, this is one of the smaller cards we have tested so far. Our ambient room sound was around 42DB so we will use that as the platform to work off. Under load the MSI went to around 56DB which is normal, considering this was an open test bench. With fan speeds of 2100RPM and 84%. With 100% fan speed it went to around 62DB more or less the same as the others.

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 for the Big Question: How does the Gigabyte 3070 perform?  For this GPU size it packs a mammoth of a punch. Beating the 2080 super in every game in every resolution. This is the all rounder King. Still have a 1080p monitor, that’s fine you will get very high frame rates. Rocking the new popular kid on the block, 1440p. This card will throw 1440p at 144HZ without a hiccup. Are you a content creator with a 4K  screen and want to enjoy a game every now and again, or maybe throw a scenic game on your 4K TV. This card will handle that as well. 

So as you can see we tested on 1080p,1440p and 4K. The 3070 fell right in between the 2080 super and 3080. Which makes it the perfect 1440p card in my opinion. It was able to run games on 4K easily, but will most likely struggle with new upcoming AAA titles. 

With the new 30 series cards, Ray tracing can actually become more popular as the previous 20 series cards, could obviously do it but with a huge frame decrease. Where the 30 series cards also have frame decreases but they still stay at a high enough frame rate to make the game enjoyable. 

I mean was seriously stomped, when I saw F1 2020 running at 144 frames at 4K. Ruan said his 1080 does F1 2020 at about 30-50 FPS on 4K. That’s 3 times more than a 1080! 

Conclusion

This card falls right into the sweet spot like the 70 range cards usually do. Being the best bang for the buck card. It can do anything, it’s very good for 1440p, can still get decent FPS in 4K. Can reach very high FPS in 1080p. This is, and will be the card to go for, you will not struggle with any game on this GPU. All I can say, that so far this is the weakest of the 30 series GPUs But by far my favourite.