Today, we have five RTX 3070 custom design reviews for you: ASUS RTX 3070 TUF Gaming OC, EVGA RTX 3070 FTW3 Ultra, Gigabyte RTX 3070 Gaming OC, MSI RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio, Zotac RTX 3070 Twin Edge OC, and of course the RTX 3070 Founders Edition review from two days ago, which has additional technical details on NVIDIA's latest card.

The GeForce RTX 3070 offers uncompromising performance for 1440p gaming, and even lets you run 4K in many titles, especially if you are willing to reduce details settings a bit. What also made waves during the initial launch is the competitive $500 MSRP, which is also the price point for NVIDIA's Founders Edition that not only impresses with looks, but also runs very quietly and introduces the highly sought-after fan-stop capability, which sets the bar high for custom designs.

The ASUS GeForce RTX 3070 TUF Gaming OC comes with a factory overclock of +90 MHz that turns into surprisingly little extra performance—we measured only 1%. Actual clock rates are 1916 MHz, not that much higher than the 1882 MHz average we saw on the FE. This 1.8% actual clock increase is quite a bit less than what the 90 MHz or 5.2% increase promises. I guess ASUS was too conservative with their power limit increase. On average, at 1440p, we see the TUF Gaming 1% ahead of the RTX 3070 FE, 2% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti, or 52% faster than the RTX 2070, pretty nice. The RTX 3080 is 22% faster, at 30% higher pricing.

With those performance numbers, RTX 3070 is the perfect choice for the huge 1440p gamer crowd, but the card also has enough muscle to run many titles at 4K 60 FPS, especially if you are willing to dial down settings a little bit. The RTX 3070 is also a great choice for 1080p Full HD if you want to drive a high-refresh-rate monitor with 120 or 144 Hz. For just 1080p 60 Hz, it's overkill unless next-gen titles go overboard with their hardware requirements, which is highly unlikely.

We've seen the ASUS TUF RTX 3070 design before, the card looks nearly identical to the RTX 3080 TUF Gaming we reviewed not long ago. Under the hood are some changes, though. The heatsink and heatpipe configuration is completely different, and the PCB is a new design for the RTX 3070, with a 10+2 VRM configuration. The ASUS TUF heatsink is quite overbuilt and works very well, reaching outstanding temperatures of just 62°C under load, which is the best of all the RTX 3070 cards tested today. Noise levels are also spectacular, just 28 dBA is whisper quiet—previously unthinkable for a card with RTX 2080 Ti performance. The TUF has a dual-BIOS feature, which lets you pick between the default "Performance" BIOS and a "quiet" BIOS that is supposed to run a more relaxed fan curve, but there is no difference other than how aggressively the fan ramps up as the card heats up. I guess the BIOS engineers didn't think this all the way through. Given temperature and noise are both ultra-low at the same time already, I'm not even sure if we need a dual BIOS on the 3070 at all. NVIDIA has introduced fan stop on their Founders Edition with Ampere, which means all board partners are expected to adopt this crucial feature, too. Outside of gaming, the fans on the ASUS TUF Gaming OC will shut off completely for the perfect noise-free experience.

Typical power consumption is very close to the 220 W of the NVIDIA Founders Edition. ASUS did increase their board power limit, although only by a small amount, from 220 W to 240 W. This is probably the reason why the factory overclock didn't yield a lot of performance gains. I have no idea why ASUS chose such a conservative value as the VRM can easily take much more power and the cooler is more than capable. The manual power adjustment range tops out at 270 W, which is better, but not good enough either; other cards tested today use that value as the default out-of-the-box setting.

Not much to report for overclocking. OC potential was roughly in the middle of our test group, mostly held back by the power limit, but the differences between all our cards are relatively small anyway. Memory OC is very impressive, reaching over 2100 MHz, up over 20% from the default 1750 MHz. Just like on all other recent NVIDIA cards, the power limiter will complicate overclocking because you can no longer dial in a specific maximum frequency and have to do additional testing to really ensure proper stability. Memory OC is a bit simpler as memory stability issues show immediately and not only as lowered performance, like on GDDR6X.

According to ASUS, the RTX 3070 TUF Gaming OC will retail for $540, or 8%, which is not an unreasonable price increase. The problem is that the Founders Edition is such an excellent card at a very good price, which makes it hard to find reasons to spend more. The factory overclock certainly isn't one of those reasons as it's tiny with just 1% gained—an idea could be to save some money by buying the regular TUF without an OC and overclocking it manually. The ASUS TUF cooler is excellent and improves both noise and temperatures by a good deal, but the subjective difference to the FE won't be earth-shattering. The Founders Edition will probably be available in limited quantities; if it drops out of the race, the TUF Gaming will be an excellent choice. However, supply levels for the RTX 3070 are unknown at this time. If demand is as high as for RTX 3080/3090, prices might actually go up before they go down. AMD has just announced the Radeon RX 6800 at a $580 price point and promised performance that looks very impressive, similar to what the RTX 3070 offers, so I'm expecting considerable changes on pricing in this segment very soon.