Monday, December 21st 2020
ASUS Gives GeForce RTX 3070 the Turbo Lateral Blower Treatment
ASUS today rolled out the GeForce RTX 3070 Turbo graphics card. Given that the company built lateral-airflow coolers for even the 350 W RTX 3090, such a card based on the RTX 3070 should come as little surprise. ASUS designs these cards for cases with airflow restrictions. The card is strictly 2 slots thick and full-height. It uses a lateral blower-type cooling solution that uses a vapor-chamber plate and a copper channel-type heatsink; and a lateral fan that uses double-ball bearing. The card draws power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors located along the tail end, rather than on the top. The card sticks to NVIDIA-reference clock speeds of up to 1725 MHz GPU Boost, and 14 Gbps (GDDR6-effective) memory; although a software-activated "OC Mode" can run it up to 1755 MHz. Display outputs include three DisplayPort 1.4a, and one HDMI 2.1 connectors. The company didn't reveal pricing or availability information.
41 Comments on ASUS Gives GeForce RTX 3070 the Turbo Lateral Blower Treatment
"lateral" being the unnecessary adjective in this article.
Even ethics of a single employee aside, the 6800 series are objectively inferior to the 3070/3060ti because of an uncomparative feature set. The 3080 alone makes the 6900XT unviable. Its hard to hear but its the truth
And even if it was (which it absolutely isn't!), then they have done plenty of coverage on RTX in their own videos. They've dedicated multiple pieces of content to tensor/RTX workloads. Nvidia even used their quote for DLSS to promote it, on their own site. And while real-time RT is absolutely the future, the cards of today are still basically in the alpha phase of supporting it. If you want RTX, wait a couple generations and then buy. No card today is going to be good at RTX 2+ years down the line anyway.
That being said, I still buy NVIDIA because DLSS is a killer feature that is a must-have IMO. AMD doesn't have an answer to it (atm) and therefore I cannot consider them. I don't want to support NVIDIA, but it's the choice I'm stuck with if I want a high-end gaming rig.
Shower thought:
If you actually want to slap RTX 3070 into airflow restricted case, just buy a better case first.
The problem is that they keep choosing fans capable of 5000RPM that has a deep, throaty growl. Up until about 3500RPM (which is already an obnoxious 50dBA or so) you can hear the motor noise over the noise of air moving. At the 1500RPM-2500RPM that it will spend 95% of the time running, I don't want to hear the fan motor, the card should be damn near silent at that point.
I thought quiet PWM fans were a solved problem now but Asus seem to have found some industrial 'noise levels don't matter' models to keep building their turbo cards.
Not so true with these bargain-basement, all-plastic, too-cheap-even-for-a-backplate garbage blowers from OEMs like Asus and Zotac.
Also intentionally delivering subpar end product to enthusiasts, straight from inception... good luck with that.
And yeah, people who don't know any better do pay absurd amounts of money for a "high-end gaming PC" from the likes of Dell and then get practically abused. I'm not talking about enthusiasts, but rather the majority of people who buy prebuilts, namely amateurs who don't know any better.
I see three axial fans. Completely bone-stock axial fans.
If you're talking about this image below, it's not a real card, it was a fan-made photoshop added to a pre-reveal leak article:
and it was just as fake as this one:
The closest I can think of is the old GTX 690 card and it's another axial fan, not a lateral/radial fan. Nvidia never made that mistake again, because it was a cooling disaster, lol.