Packaging

The Card

NVIDIA's Founders Edition looks stunning—it could be an Apple product. Compared to the GeForce 30 Series, NVIDIA has made small improvements to the design language, making it an even cleaner design than before. As with Ampere, the card is designed for airflow to go through the card—that's why there's two fans. One sucks in cool air from the bottom, is pushed through the card and then blown out towards the case top on the other side.


While the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 were huge cards, the RTX 4070 is rather compact.


From left to right: RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, RTX 4070, RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3080.


Dimensions of the card are 24 x 11 cm, and it weighs 1033 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 the new 12+4 pin ATX 12VHPWR connector, which is rated for up to 600 W of power draw. An adapter cable from 2x PCIe 8-pin is included (which is rated for up to 300 W). The card's default power limit is 200 W. Of course the 3x and 4x 8-pin to 16-pin adapter cables from other Ampere cards will work with the RTX 4070, but the card won't need or use that much power.

Teardown

Disassembly is similar to earlier Founders Edition graphics cards. First pop off the top cover, it's attached magnetically—great idea.


Now remove several Torx screws.


With the back cover removed, we have to disconnect two flat-ribbon cables. Use your fingers where possible, instead of metal tools. Flip the connector latch up, as displayed in the second photo, then carefully pull out the cable. Remove the screws on the slot cover and you can remove the heatsink from the PCB.


NVIDIA has installed four heatpipes that move heat away from the GPU surface.


The cooler has copper base and provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry, too.