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With our third RTX 3070 review, today our attention has turned to Gigabyte and its RTX 3070 Gaming OC.
Gigabyte has pushed the power limit up 50W compared to reference spec, with the main benefit of that coming in the form of very stable out of the box clock speed behaviour. The GPU boosted to 1995MHz for the majority of our testing, and averaged 1999MHz across our 30 minute stress test. It's not quite 2GHz out of the box, but it may as well be.
This means the Gaming OC is the fastest RTX 3070 we've tested to-date. Once more, the differences aren't huge, but it is on average 3% faster than the Nvidia Founders Edition, and 1% faster than MSI's Gaming X Trio, when testing at 1440p. As I remarked in my Founders Edition review, I do feel RTX 3070 is best suited for 1440p high refresh-rate gaming, though it can do 4K – just not at an always-locked 60FPS in every single game.
Despite the 50W increase to power draw, Gigabyte's Gaming OC still runs relatively cool. With the OC BIOS engaged, we saw a peak temperature of 68C, and a peak of 70C when using the Silent BIOS, which runs the fans about 200RPM slower. That obviously means the Silent BIOS is the quieter of the two, though MSI's Gaming X Trio is quieter still in its out of the box state, while also offering slightly better thermal performance.
The main downside to this card is the reduction in power efficiency compared to both the RTX 3070 Founders Edition and the MSI Gaming X Trio. With graphics card-only power draw averaging 267W, that's almost a 24% increase compared to the Founders Edition, despite the Gigabyte GPU running no more than 5% faster in our testing. As a result, the Founders Edition offers noticeably better performance per Watt, to the tune of almost 22%.
We did manage to boost performance further via manual overclocking, with gains between 6-9% once our best overclock was dialled in. This may not be as big an increase to performance when compared to our overclocked Gaming X Trio, but that's simply because the Gaming OC comes from a higher starting point so its overall headroom is more limited.
All in all, the Gigabyte RTX 3070 Gaming OC is another very solid custom RTX 3070 card. I wouldn’t say it was clearly better than the MSI Gaming X Trio across the board, but I think that's because they are trying to do slightly different things. The Gigabyte Gaming OC runs faster out of the box, has a higher power limit and also comes with dual-BIOS, which I really like to see.
The Gaming X Trio, on the other hand, is the quieter card overall and it also runs a little bit cooler. With both supposed to cost £540 here in the UK – that’s the MSRP, at least – it really comes down to what features you personally prioritise the most. I myself would probably go for Gaming OC due to its dual-BIOS and higher power limit, but they’re both very attractive solutions.
AMD's RX 6000 is certainly going to provide the main competition to RTX 3070 when it launches later this month. AMD has shared plenty of its own performance numbers, but until I can test the cards myself, we won't know just how things stack up against the RTX 3070. If you are looking to buy a new graphics card though, I would certainly advising waiting for our RX 6000 reviews.
The Gaming OC has an MSRP of £539.99. It is currently up for pre-order on Overclockers UK for £589.99 HERE.
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Pros
- Fastest RTX 3070 we've tested so far.
- Good looking, colour-neutral shroud.
- Very stable clock frequency.
- Dual-BIOS.
Cons
- Less efficient than the Founders Edition.
- Gaming X Trio is cooler and quieter out of the box.
- RX 6000 comes out this month.
KitGuru says: Gigabyte's RTX 3070 Gaming OC is a very capable RTX 3070 graphics card. We will know more about how it compares to AMD RX 6000 later this month.
