Packaging

The Card

As mentioned earlier, the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition is a brand-new design from NVIDIA that is neither the RTX 3070 FE nor the RTX 3080 FE, but a cross between the two. The dual-axial flow-through design is carried over, but with the S-shaped aluminium accent dissecting two halves of the cooler. The fan on the obverse side pulls in fresh air, which is guided through one half of the cooler, while the second fan, located at the backplate, pulls air through the heatsink and out the back. According to NVIDIA, this ensures uniform heat dissipation along both ends of the cooler. With its rich aluminium surfaces and diamond-cut edges, the card looks like a piece of jewellery.


Dimensions of the card are 27 x 11 cm, and it weighs 1199 g.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and one 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.


Just like the RTX 3080 and other Ampere cards, the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition uses the NVIDIA 12-pin power connector. It's basically a much more compact solution to provide a lot of power for the card. The 12-pin carries up to 300 W of power, the equivalent of two 8-pin PCIe power cables. Total available power is 375 W (300 W from the 12-pin + 75 W from the PCIe slot). With every Founders Edition, NVIDIA includes a 2x 8-pin to 12-pin adapter cable, so you're good to go and don't need any special adapters.

Unfortunately, NVIDIA has placed it in the middle of the card, which makes the life of case modders more difficult because cleanly routing the cable won't be easy.


The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti does not support SLI.

Teardown

The teardown is a tricky process, just like with other Ampere Founders Edition cards. We'll go through it step by step.


First, remove the magnetic screw covers and screws underneath (TorX T5). Using magnets instead of glue is an ingenious approach that impresses me every time. NVIDIA could have simply used glue and saved some money, but it would have made taking the card apart much harder for us.

Try to avoid using metal tools to remove the screw covers; you'll probably scratch them. The magnets feel stronger than on the RTX 3080 FE. Apply force from the outside edge of the cover, towards the inside, not from the inside towards the outside.


Remove the metal cover near the right-side fan.


Remove the backplate. The thermal pads on the backplate are 1.3 mm thick.


Remove the two flat ribbon cables. Fold up the connector with your fingers and pull out the cable. This is exactly the same approach as on the RTX 3080 Founders Edition; we have more details on that step in our RTX 3080 FE review.


Remove the TorX screws holding the GPU in place.


Remove the screw for the slot cover.


Remove the remaining four screws holding the slot cover in place.


You can now wiggle the PCB away from the heatsink.


A copper base makes direct contact with the GPU, while a secondary base plate pulls heat from the memory and VRM components.


Four 8-mm-thick, nickel-plated copper heat pipes skewer both heatsinks and make contact with the base and secondary base plate.