The ASUS GeForce RTX 2070 STRIX OC comes with a medium-sized overclock out of the box, which yields an additional 3% performance—not a lot. This seems to be a common theme with Turing, overclocked versions really aren't significantly faster than the Founders Edition due to how the power limits work, but more on that later. Compared to the GTX 1080, the RTX 2070 STRIX OC is 20% faster, and the GTX 1080 Ti is 6% ahead; the RTX 2080 comes with a 16% performance uplift. AMD's fastest, the Radeon RX Vega 64, is around 20% slower, with much more power draw, heat, and noise at the same time. With these performance characteristics, we can recommend the RTX 2070 for 1440p highest details gaming.

ASUS has installed a mighty heatsink on the STRIX OC, which delivers excellent temperatures of only 65°C under load, but does so with quite a lot of fan noise that's noticeably higher than on the Founders Edition. I'm not sure why ASUS is focusing so much on temperatures with this generation as there is really no tangible difference between 65°C, 70°C, and 75°C—it doesn't affect OC potential or lifetime in a meaningful way. Luckily, ASUS has included a dual-BIOS feature on their card, with the second BIOS offering a "quiet" mode that runs at the same performance levels, but with a less aggressive fan curve. In that mode, the card is very quiet with 31 dBA, but I feel that it could still be a little bit quieter, which would strengthen ASUS's position with the low-noise crowd. The "quiet" BIOS does have fan stop for the perfect noise-free experience during idle, Internet browsing, and light gaming. The default BIOS will not stop its fans, which I find surprising since nearly all vendors offer this feature on their graphics cards, more quiet or not. With 27 dBA, the noise levels in idle are really quiet, just not completely noise-free, which would have been easy to do.

Like all other GeForce RTX 20-series cards, the ASUS RTX 2070 is held back by Turing's power limits despite the addition of an extra 6-pin power connector. While previous generations were limited by GPU temperatures, cards will now sit in their power limit all the time during gaming, which means the highest boost clocks are never reached during regular gameplay. ASUS did increase the board power limit from 185 W to 215 W; even higher values would have definitely helped yield more performance. With 269 W, the manual adjustment range for the power limit is higher than on any other RTX 2070 card we tested so far. The VRM is upgraded to 8-phase as well, so allowing even more power draw out of the box shouldn't have been a problem.

Manual overclocking has once more become more complicated with this generation. Since the cards are always running in the power limiter, you can no longer just dial-in stable clocks for the highest boost state to find the maximum overclock. The biggest issue is that you can't just reach that state reliably, so your testing is limited to whatever frequency your test load is running at. Nevertheless, we managed to pull through and achieved a good overclock on our RTX 2070 that translated into 6% additional performance. We found overclocking potential of our card to be similar to the Founders Edition and other RTX 2070 cards we tested before.

The ASUS card does tick a lot of feature checkboxes. For example, it has voltage measurement points for volt-modders, and the previously mentioned dual-BIOS feature. Another useful feature can be the two fan headers that let you connect case fans to your graphics card, and they'll run at the same speed as the card's own fans, which should help with noise when not gaming, while still providing airflow when the card is heavily loaded. Last but not least, the card offers RGB lighting on the backplate and you may connect other components in your system to it so that colors are matched.

With a price of $630, the ASUS RTX 2070 STRIX OC is not exactly cheap. Even though it does offer a lot of added features, I find it difficult to justify that price. You can find a lot of RTX 2070 cards starting at $500, with very similar performance because out of the box overclocking doesn't make much of a difference with Turing. We reviewed the EVGA RTX 2070 Black a while ago, which is one of those $500 cards and were pleasantly surprised by it, and it offers good noise levels too. If you are looking for the highest performance, then the Zotac AMP offers the highest clocks and is cheaper than the STRIX at the same time. The mostly cited selling point for ASUS this generation has been the low noise levels of the cards, thanks to the quiet BIOS, but that price increase will be a tough sell.