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 32 x 13 cm, and it weighs 1218 g.


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.


This BIOS switch lets you toggle between the default "Performance" BIOS and a secondary "Silent" BIOS.


Power is drawn from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Along with slot power, this configuration supplies up to 375 W. I really like how Gigabyte has placed their power connectors near the corner of the card, unlike nearly all other RTX 3070 Ti cards.


The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti does not support SLI.

Teardown

Gigabyte's thermal solution uses seven heatpipes. The main heatsink not only cools the GPU, but also provides cooling for memory chips and VRM circuitry. The thermal pads on the VRM are 1.3 mm thick, and those on the memory are 2.0 mm thick.


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