With the launch of the new Nvidia RTX 3070, alongside the Founders Edition cards, the Green Team allowed third-party graphics card manufacturers to launch factory overclocked SKUs. Then came the Asus TUF RTX 3070 OC. This is a third tier slightly higher clocked version of the Ampere GeForce card. [It certainly looks chunky when placed alongside the FE versions of mainstream Nvidia GPUs. The Founders Edition versions all benefit from Nvidia's own engineering efforts to reduce PCB size and make cards that are not necessarily as bulky as the heart of a larger GPU.

The same cannot be said for third-party versions, which are often much larger than Nvidia's reference cards. However, the RTX 3080 was still quite large, so it wasn't as obvious, but the RTX 3070 is much neater and petite; the RTX 3070 is much neater; the RTX 3080 is much larger than the RTX 3070, and the RTX 3070 is much larger than the RTX 3080.

However, the Asus TUF RTX 3070 has the same GPU cooler we saw on the Asus TUF RTX 3080 OC card, which is a true chombo option. This means we can expect very impressive cooling performance, which may be necessary given that this is an overclocked SKU.

Where the RTX3070's MSRP is set by Founders Edition GPUs at $499 (£469), this Asus OC card is necessarily more expensive. With a UK price of £500 and a standard price of £550 at some retailers, it is expected to be at most equal to $550 in dollar terms.

As for raw specs, the Asus version of the RTX 3070 is almost identical to the original Founders Edition, with the same GPU configuration of 5,888 CUDA cores thanks to a redesigned SM in the Ampere architecture, and its Turing-based predecessor offers twice the potential floating point logic compared to its Turing predecessor; the Turing architecture is discussed in detail in our review of the RTX 3080 FE, so please refer to that for more information.

Along with the GPU itself, the same 8GB of GDDR6 is also included, instead of the GDDR6X found on the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 cards. This is the only place where the recently announced and directly competing AMD RX 6800 could benefit. The new Big Navi card has 16GB of GDDR6 and a fancy Infinity Cache feature for increased memory bandwidth, promising slightly higher performance than the RTX 2080 Ti.

In some circumstances. these benchmarks from AMD have a bit of a caveat about how that performance was achieved.

However, while both the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 have less video memory than AMD's new cards coming out in November, I haven't noticed any particular issues with VRAM size. As such, I'm still not convinced how big a selling point the RTX 3070 will be for PC gamers.

The Asus TUF RTX 3070 OC, as the name implies, is a factory overclocked version of Nvidia's latest graphics card, so the clock speed has been changed, with the Boost clock in different modes going up to 1,905 MHz. In practice, this does not mean much since the Founders Edition is already well above the boost clock of 1,725 MHz. Realistically, we feel that OC cards are losing relevance in today's market, especially with GeForce cards.

In our own testing, the Founders Edition averaged 1,862 MHz in our gaming tests, but this Asus card averaged a higher 1,901 MHz. This is merely an additional 39 MHz above the reference clock of the Nvidia card, and inevitably there is little difference in overall gaming performance metrics.

In short, Asus GPUs are still very impressive graphics cards; Asus GPUs still offer gaming performance that is slightly above or slightly behind the RTX 2080 Ti, the top $1,200 Turing GPU of the previous generation. still offers. But no matter how it falls from game to game, the difference in performance is always negligible.

At 1440p, average frame rate performance is often in the triple digits, making this ~$500 card an outstanding gaming GPU. However, the RTX 3070 is also a pretty impressive 4K card, considering it's going head-to-head with the RTX 2080 Ti.

If you want to achieve 60 fps at 4K in any game, you'll have to adjust your desire to run at the absolute highest graphics settings, but such a desire will likely only require a little pruning to get there.

What regularly lags behind the RTX 2080 Ti, however, is ray trace performance. The top-of-the-line Turing GPUs have more RT-specific silicon built in, making them chips with more natural ray tracing. Nevertheless, you will not find a graphics card with this level of ray-tracing performance at this price anywhere else.

However, if you were expecting an overclocked GPU that could take further advantage of the new Nvidia Ampere silicon, you will be disappointed. Even in performance mode (Asus' PCB also has a Quiet Mode switch), it is not always faster than our Founders Edition cards. Occasionally the FPS will improve, but here and there the FPS will drop.

They also consume more power than more efficient Nvidia cards, thanks to their desire for overclocking performance. With peak power consumption exceeding 300W, they demand more power from the PSU than the less power-hungry FE GPUs. Nevertheless, it is much cooler, averaging almost 10°C.

This benefits from Asus' powerful cooling solution, which is identical to the non-OC version of the TUF RTX 3070. Therefore, it is very difficult to recommend this overclocked SKU instead.

Frankly, I feel that overclocking is over now; Nvidia told me that they are only now able to get the most out of their chips and guarantee clock speeds close to the limit of what the silicon can do to anyone. Indeed, overclocking the RTX 3070 Founders Edition card did nothing in terms of performance gains.

In other words, it seems to me that the silicon lottery may be a thing of the past, and factory overclocked graphics cards belong there. Especially when it comes to cards like the Asus TUF, you can get equally nice coolers on inexpensive non-OC cards.

Ultimately, the RTX 3070 is a truly impressive graphics card in all its guises, outperforming most of the previous generation of ultra-enthusiast GPUs and crushing the equally expensive RTX 2080 Super across the board. However, we recommend avoiding the price premium of the overclocked card, as it is a very good value for the money.