Packaging

The Card

Gigabyte's card uses a mix of black and gray highlights paired with a blocky industrial design. On the back you'll find a high-quality metal backplate.


Dimensions of the card are 29 x 11.5 cm.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include two standard DisplayPort 1.4a and two HDMI 2.1. The DisplayPort 1.4a outputs support Display Stream Compression (DSC) 1.2a, which lets you connect 4K displays at 120 Hz and 8K displays at 60 Hz. Ampere can drive two 8K displays at 60 Hz with just one cable per display.

Ampere is the first GPU to support HDMI 2.1, which increases bandwidth to 48 Gbps to support higher resolutions, like 4K144 and 8K30, with a single cable. With DSC, this goes up to 4K240 and 8K120. NVIDIA's new NVENC/NVDEC video engine is optimized to handle video tasks with minimal CPU load. The highlight here is added support for AV1 decode. Just like on Turing, you may also decode MPEG-2, VC1, VP8, VP9, H.264, and H.265 natively, at up to 8K@12-bit.

The encoder is identical to Turing. It supports H.264, H.265 and lossless at up to 8K@10-bit.


Unlike the NVIDIA Founders Edition card that uses the new 12-pin power input, Gigabyte sticks to industry standard PCIe power inputs. Together with the PCIe slot, this 6+8 power configuration is specified to supply up to 300 W of power.


Using this BIOS switch you may toggle between the silent BIOS and OC BIOS. Looks like two different teams designed the backplate and PCB as the labels are printed a few centimeters from where the actual switch is located.


The GeForce RTX 3070 does not support SLI. Only the RTX 3090 does, and it has very limited SLI support.

Teardown

Gigabyte's cooler uses five heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU surface to keep the card cool. The main heatsink also provides cooling for memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.