Nvidia RTX 3070 Founders Edition Review

1. Introduction2. RTX 3070 Founders Edition3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. 3DMark Port Royal6. Control7. Death Stranding8. The Division 29. Far Cry New Dawn10. Gears 511. Ghost Recon: Breakpoint12. Metro Exodus13. Middle Earth: Shadow of War14. Red Dead Redemption 215. Shadow of the Tomb Raider16. Total War Saga: Troy17. Performance Summary (11 Game Average)18. Cost Per Frame Analysis19. RTX On - Control20. RTX On - Metro Exodus21. RTX On - Shadow of the Tomb Raider22. DLSS On - Control & Death Stranding23. Productivity: Blender & Octane24. Productivity: SPECviewPerf & V-Ray25. Clock Speed26. Temperatures27. Acoustics28. Power Consumption29. Performance Per Watt30. Overclocking31. Closing Thoughts32. View All Pages

We measure system-wide power draw from the wall while running the 3DMark Time Spy stress test for 30 minutes.

We measured total system power draw at 330W during our stress test, which is essentially on par with the GTX 1080 Ti, and only a touch ahead of the RTX 2070 Super. Compared to the RTX 2070, it's about 40W higher.

We also use GPU-Z to measure Board Power (graphics card-only power draw). This is currently only available for Nvidia cards, which is why we have excluded AMD results from the chart. Aside from the fact this is software-based reporting, and not a hardware measurement of the PCIe power cables and PCIe slot (for that we’d need something like PCAT), this should provide us more accurate data to work with as it is measuring only the GPU power, and not total system power which is a fundamentally imprecise measurement.

RTX 3070 has a rated total graphics power value of 220W, and using the GPU-Z Board Power metric, we saw average power draw come in at 216W, so pretty much bang on its rated value. This is 4W higher than the RTX 2070 Super, and 42W above the RTX 2070. Crucially, it is also 42W less than the RTX 2080 Ti, despite offering essentially identical gaming performance.

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