This is probably the first time in recent memory that we have featured a card available for purchase. What's more, prices have been dropping; Nvidia's hash rate limiter may be the reason the cards are in the hands of gamers rather than miners. Or could it be that the lower crypto prices have made buying up container loads of GPUs riskier than it was earlier this year? Here's a review of a new card, the Gigabyte Aorus GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Master, and after five seconds you'll suspect this isn't your run-of-the-mill GeForce RTX 3070 Ti.

The RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition didn't wow us like other RTX 30 series cards. It feels more like an overclocked 3070 than something that bridges the large gap between the standard GeForce RTX 3070 and GeForce RTX 3080. However, the Aorus Master is built to get everything it can out of the GA104 GPU version.

Like all RTX 3070 Ti cards, it uses a fully enabled chip with up to 6,144 cores unlocked. This compares to 5,888 for the RTX 3070 and 4,864 for the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. The bigger upgrade, however, is the switch to faster GDDR6X memory. This alone represents a bandwidth increase of more than 30% over the RTX 3070.

We would have liked to see 16GB of faster video memory on board, but doing so would make the RTX 3080 and more recent GeForce RTX 3080 Ti look underspecified.

For a complete analysis of the hardware at its heart, see the RTX 3070 Ti spec breakdown.

This Aorus Master is Gigabyte's flagship RTX 3070 Ti. It is a huge card. And being a 4-slot card, you can almost forget about using it in an SFF system. The boost clock is 1,875 MHz, a 105 MHz improvement over FE, and to provide the necessary power, it has two 6-pin and two 8-pin power connectors, dual BIOS, and, as expected, RGB lighting. And what about the LCD on the side? It can display real-time GPU monitoring information or a custom text or GIF of your choice.

It would be a travesty to hide them inside the case.

These are just a few of the features that set it apart from the regular RTX 3070 Ti. It also has no less than six display outputs, four of which can be used simultaneously: three DP 1.4a, two HDMI 2.1, and one HDMI 2.0 port. This opens up a wide range of connectivity options. For example, you can connect a multi-monitor setup, a large TV, or a VR headset at the same time. Not many cards can do this without replacing cables. It also comes with a warranty of up to 4 years.

Not many cards have 4-slot coolers. That means you can expect class-leading quietness and cooling performance. It does an excellent job on the latter, but not as well as one might expect on the former.

Gigabyte seems to have tuned the cooler for maximum performance. During the stress test, the peak temperature was only 68°C, which is great, but comes at the cost of a high level of noise. In fact, the card's fan rose to 70%.

The noise was not intrusive and more akin to air movement than the mechanical whine of a fan. We suspect that the cooler shroud may be a bit too restrictive, and that the fan noise is not as loud as it should be. While a boost clock drop is inevitable, it is easy to adjust the fan curve to achieve a lower noise level.

The test was performed with the quiet BIOS mode enabled. The result was a fan speed of 68% over a long period of time. Compared to the default BIOS of 70%, the difference is minimal, but we recommend using the quiet BIOS as there is no performance degradation.

When it comes to boost clock, the card can be boosted to very high levels due to the excellent heat dissipation of the cooler. In fact, the card was able to maintain a boost clock of 1,980Mhz after 10 minutes of load. 80MHz higher than the Founders Edition sample and an impressive 65MHz higher than the MSI Gaming X.

Synthetic gaming performance

1080p gaming performance

1440p gaming performance

Compared to the RTX 3070, the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition may not have given us the frame rate leap we expected, though, The Aorus Master's additional cooling capacity allows it to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the GA104 GPU, which performs well at 4K, but is better suited for 1440p gamers using high refresh rate monitors.

The Aorus Master is consistently faster than the FE, but with 20+W of additional power consumption; once you start exceeding 310W, you approach RTX 3080 territory, which is a much faster card. AMD's Radeon RX 6800 remains a very competitive product, but one should not forget Nvidia's powerful feature set and ray tracing performance advantage.

Our Aorus Master sample had little overclocking headroom, likely due to power limitations, as the GPU appears to have already reached its limits. Still, it is impressive that it can sustain clocks above 2 GHz.

However, the card did have a lot of memory overclocking headroom. Memory could be set to 1,438 MHz, a 250 MHz increase from the default 1,188 MHz. As a result, bandwidth increased from the stock 608.3 GB/s to 736.3 GB/s. This is an increase of more than 20%. Using 1440p Metro Exodus as a test, the final OC result was 90.1 fps compared to the default 85.9 fps and FE 84.0 fps.

The Aorus Master offers everything one would expect from a flagship version of a GPU. Plenty of outputs, an attention-grabbing LED screen, a high-performance cooler (albeit a bit too loud at default settings), and a four-year warranty.

Faster than the 3070 Ti FE, but is it the card to buy?" If you think of a PC as a work of art, like the box you keep under your desk, the answer is probably yes. But the market is changing. Card inventory is increasing and prices are coming down in some countries. Ask yourself, do you want a gorgeous, feature-rich card, or would you rather spend a little more on a basic but much more powerful RTX 3080?

The same question can be asked when considering a top-class card: do you care about 180fps vs. 220fps in 1080p esport games? If the answer is yes, then consider the RTX 3080. But if you view your rig as a monitor, the Aorus Master is a card that won't be out of place on any showpiece system.