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, which 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 EVGA RTX 3070 FTW3 Ultra comes with a factory overclock of +90 MHz, which is the second-highest of all the cards we're reviewing today. Average GPU frequency in gaming is 1967 MHz, a 4.6% improvement over the RT 3070 Founders Edition. This turns into a real-life performance gain of 3% more over the other RTX 3070s tested today because of the large power limit increase. Compared against other cards, we see the FTW3 Ultra 3% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti on average at 1440p, and 54% ahead of the RTX 2070, pretty nice. The RTX 3080 is 20% 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.

The RTX 3070 FTW3 cooler looks identical to that of the RTX 3080 FTW3 we reviewed only days ago. Under the hood, things are different, though. EVGA adjusted the heatpipe configuration to the requirements of the RTX 3070, and the PCB is completely different, too, now using a 12+2 VRM configuration. EVGA's triple-slot, triple-fan heatsink performs very well, even beating the large RTX 3080 FE heatsink in our new apples-to-apples heatsink testing by a quite big margin. Gaming temperatures are excellent, just 64°C under full load. Unfortunately, noise levels are a bit higher than expected. With 35 dBA, they are among the loudest of all the RTX 3070 cards tested today. 35 dBA isn't "loud" in any way, I would describe it as "well audible", which is totally fine for a card in the RTX 2080 Ti performance class. Still, other cards do better here. I reached out to EVGA to confirm if these are really the intended fan settings, but they haven't responded yet. I have no doubt that if EVGA allowed slightly higher temperature, their cooler could be whisper-quiet, matching the other RTX 3070s from ASUS and MSI. Since the card comes with a dual BIOS, people would still have a choice between reduced noise levels or lower temperatures. NVIDIA has introduced fan stop on their Founders Edition with Ampere, which means all board partners are expected to adopt this crucial feature, too. When not gaming, the fans on the FTW3 Ultra will shut off completely for the perfect noise-free experience.

EVGA has increased their card's power limit to 270 W, which is the highest increase of all the RTX 3070 cards tested today. This helps unlock additional performance as NVIDIA's Boost algorithm has additional headroom to boost to higher frequencies. Although the boost clock rating would suggest otherwise, we see it in the highest out-of-the-box performance. EVGA also gave overclockers a decent manual power-adjustment range of up to 300 W. I feel like there's more headroom in this VRM and wouldn't be surprised if EVGA released an XOC BIOS with higher power limits down the road.

GPU overclocking worked better than on all other RTX 3070 cards tested today and reached the highest overclock. The reason is the power limit, which lets the GPU boost higher during overclocking. Memory OC is very impressive, too, reaching over 2100 MHz, up over 20% from the default of 1750 MHz. The differences between overclocking on all these cards isn't huge though, a few percent in real-life performance, so probably not a reason to justify excessive spending. Memory OC on the RTX 3070 is a bit easier because of GDDR6, which shows memory instability issues during OC testing immediately and not only with lowered performance, like on GDDR6X.

According to EVGA, the RTX 3070 FTW3 Ultra will retail for $610, which is simply much too expensive. Unless you are a hardcore overclocker, there's no way a $110 cost increase over the Founders Edition can be worth it. Actually, for the vast majority of gamers, the FE will offer nearly identical performance with much better noise levels in a more compact form factor. There are also many custom designs for $540 and below that aren't vastly different from the FTW3. On the other hand, supply of the FE might be limited, and it could sell out very quickly, forcing gamers to look at more expensive SKUs—it happened with 3080 and 3090 just weeks ago. 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.