NVIDIA launched their RTX 20-series cards late last year and despite lukewarm reception, the card were the latest and greatest and managed to at least move from the store shelves. That being said, the GeForce RTX 20-series cards also introduced a new pricing strategy from NVIDIA, one that would see the RTX 2080 Ti, the highest model at launch, get a $1200 price tag.
The RTX 2070 is the third card coming off the 20-series announcement and is intended for gamers that play at 1440p resolution offering performance competitive roughly of the GTX 1070 Ti and GTX 1080. The card is positioned at the $500 price following the new, steeper pricing of the RTX cards and while in itself the card is quite capable, it does still compete in a market where last-gen GTX 1080 Tis and GTX 1080/1070 Tis are able to keep up if not, best the RTX 2070, even at pricing alone.
The RTX Dilemma
NVIDIA was late in sending out the Founders Edition for this graphics card and partners were asked to send their $500 cards during the launch review wave but in line with our direction to defer all RTX reviews until January to wait for RTX- or DLSS-enabled games, we’ve held out on any reviews since then. As of this moment only Battlefield V utilizes RTX via its DXR implementation. There are a couple of title like Final Fantasy XV that uses DLSS and also some titles that leverage a few other tech but since real-time raytracing is the main draw of the RTX product line, there’s not much reason for gamers to really invest in RTX except the promise of upcoming titles. NVIDIA has announced more than 20 games during launch to support RTX and more devs stepping into the plate as the days go by but no new release has yet to have it. Its a very long waiting game and NVIDIA has been on the losing end because of this. For buyers, they end up with powerful graphics card for a higher price but is ready for the realtime raytracing and DLSS content when they come.
About the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070
The NVIDIA RTX 2070 is the third card in the NVIDIA RTX stack initial announcement. It was released a bit later than the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 and NVIDIA has set a starting SRP of $499 for the card. The RTX 2070 Founders Edition is priced at $599. Board partners have SKUs that start at $499 which is what NVIDIA has asked but will be able to make models that can go higher in pricing.
The RTX 2070 is a change in direction in terms of the chip segment. Previous GPUs of the xx70 lineage have been cutback version of the xx80 cards sharing a similar GPU e.g. the Pascal-based GP104 are used by the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 which is joined later on by the GTX 1070 Ti. For the RTX 2070, it uses the TU106. The TU106 is basically one-half of the TU102 powering the RTX 2080 Ti.
The RTX 2070 features 2304 CUDA cores and runs at 1410Mhz base clock and can turbo up to 1620Mhz on reference cards. NVIDIA distinguishes their self-made Founders Edition cards for the RTX 20-series with a factory OC and the RTX 2070 FE will have a boost clock of 1710Mhz. The RTX 2070 features 8GB of GDDR6 memory running at 1750Mhz wired to a 256-bit wide bus.
ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2070
The ROG Strix line from ASUS has saw slight shift in design from the previous generation. The 10-series GTX cards in the ROG Strix line featured triple-fan, 2-slot designs and except for the GTX 1080 Ti, was uniform throughout that entire generation. Fast-forward to today and we have the new-generation ROG Strix design.
ASUS still maintains a similar design to the last-gen with some slight changes here and there. The most pronounced shift is the size of the heatsink itself which bumps the card to around 2.25 slot height. With NVIDIA only supporting dual-card SLI configs going forward, most motherboards have noted this and have made 3x spacing between GPUs a norm for mainstream releases with high-end options up to board makers to configure if they want a 4x or 3x PCIe spacing for their main x16 slots.
Going back to the ROG Strix RTX 2070, the card doesn’t differ much in terms of design from the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti counterpart although there are some very significant differences. The lack of NVLink connector (inherent to the RTX 2070) is one identifier and the ROG STRIX RTX 2070 has a 6-pin+8-pin PCI-e power config versus 2×8-pin PCI-e power on the RTX 2080/2080 Ti. Also the ROG Strix RTX 2080/2080 Ti coolers are 2.7x slot height and feature a very different cooler technology although the shroud may seem the same. The RTX 2070 ROG Strix cooler is more similar to the previous-gen than the higher cards in ASUS’ ROG Strix RTX stack.
The ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2070 features similar configuration with the reference card but features a 1815Mhz boost clock. Memory clock remains untouched at 1750Mhz.
