Today, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2070 Super is available on store shelves and reviews of the AIC partner cards are allowed. All of NVIDIA's board partners have released Super models, and this review covers the ASUS RTX 2070 Super STRIX OC—we have a total of six reviews today covering other vendors, and the RTX 2060 Super, too.

ASUS has massively overclocked their RTX 2070 Super STRIX OC by +135 MHz rated boost, to 1905 MHz. This, paired with a massively increased board power limit, lets the card gain 6% performance over the RTX 2070 Super Founders Edition. The much more expensive RTX 2080 is a tiny 1% faster—really nice gains on the ASUS card indeed. With a 10% lead, the ASUS RTX 2070 Super STRIX OC dominates AMD's Radeon VII flagship, too, and the aging GTX 1080 Ti is 8% behind. AMD recently released the Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 XT—the STRIX OC is 17% faster. With those performance numbers, we can easily recommend the card for gaming at 1440p.

The large triple-slot thermal solution ASUS uses has its roots in their RTX 2080 lineup, so it brings plenty of cooling power to the table. Using the default BIOS, temperatures are 9°C better than on the RTX 2070 Super Founders Edition with slightly higher fan noise and no fan stop. Luckily, ASUS does include a dual-BIOS feature with their card. The second BIOS improves the fan curve big time, reducing noise levels of the card to only 29 dBA. No, that's not in idle, but with heavy gaming, which is very impressive as many cards on the market idle at those noise levels. The second BIOS also adds the highly popular idle-fan stop feature on the STRIX, which completely shuts off the card's fans during idle, desktop work and light gaming. I would definitely recommend you switch to the quiet BIOS after purchase and use that all the time. There's no benefit from the reduced temperatures, but you will enjoy the lower-noise experience all the time. ASUS has also included 4-pin PWM case-fan headers that let you synchronize your PC's cooling to the graphics card. There's also an addressable RGB header that lets you control some add-on lighting over the Aura Sync RGB app.

ASUS has significantly improved their card's board power limit, up to 255 W from the NVIDIA default of 215 W, which is part of the reason why the out-of-the-box performance is so much higher—NVIDIA's Boost algorithm will let the card boost higher for longer. What's surprising is that this increase hasn't negatively effected power efficiency much. Extra power consumed is turned into just as much of a performance increase; maybe the excellent VRM plays a role in that, too.

Overclocking our card worked well because the power limiter didn't mess with our overclock, which let us dial in exactly the frequency we wanted—right up to the edge of stability. With 2105 MHz on average, GPU OC is higher than on other RTX 2070 cards we tested before. It would have been nice to see some memory overclock out of the box as the chips can definitely take it, which our manual overclocking results show.

Unlike AMD's Radeon RX 5700 XT, the NVIDIA RTX Super lineup comes with support for raytracing hardware acceleration. While that's not the most important feature to have right now, it looks like game developers are picking up on it, and many upcoming titles have been announced to feature raytracing, so the future might be bright for RTX.

Priced at $590, the ASUS RTX 2070 Super STRIX OC comes at a massive $90 premium over the RTX 2070 Super Founders Edition. That's a lot of money (+18%). Out of the box performance alone can't justify that since it's only 6% more. There's no doubt that the ASUS thermal solution is a lot better than the Founders Edition, but is that worth $90? I'm not sure. However, another angle to look at this price at is when considering the RTX 2080. It retails at $700, which makes it another $110 more expensive than the ASUS RTX 2070 Super STRIX OC, and both cards deliver pretty much identical performance. So if you are in the market for an RTX 2080, then maybe consider the ASUS RTX 2070 Super with its premium cooler, idle-fan stop, and low noise. Actually, maybe wait for the RTX 2080 Super reviews later this month, which could stir up things in this price range, too. In order to sweeten the deal, NVIDIA includes a two-game bundle with all RTX Super cards consisting of Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Control. Both titles come with support for NVIDIA RTX raytracing to show off the capabilities of their new technology.