Packaging

The Card

Gainward's RTX 4070 Ghost comes with mostly-black color theme that's lightened up by the 3D structure in the main cooler, which reflects light at various angles. On the other side you'll find a plastic backplate that has a cutout for air to flow through.


Dimensions of the card are 27 x 13 cm, and it weighs 763 g.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4a ports and one HDMI 2.1a (same as Ampere).

The new 8th Gen NVENC now accelerates AV1 encoding, besides HEVC. You also get an "optical flow accelerator" unit that is able to calculate intermediate frames for videos, to smooth playback. The same hardware unit is used for frame generation in DLSS 3.


The card uses a single 8-pin power connector, which, together with the PCIe slot, is specified for up to 225 W power draw. Some other RTX 4070 cards like the NVIDIA Founders Edition come with the new 16-pin connector, but they are limited to the same power draw levels. NVIDIA has given their partners free choice on what connector they use, and I suspect the classic 8-pin is a little bit cheaper to implement.


Gainward has placed an illuminated logo near the power connector area.

Teardown

Removing the fan shroud with the two fans is easy, which makes them replaceable down the road, in a couple of years.


Gainward's heatsink uses four heatpipes to keep the card cool. The main cooler also provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The plastic backplate protects the card against damage during installation and handling.