Palit's GeForce RTX 2070 GameRock Premium is the company's flagship RTX 2070 card. It comes overclocked out of the box to a rated boost frequency of 1815 MHz, which is just 15 MHz shy of the highest factory overclocks available for the RTX 2070. Unfortunately, the memory isn't overclocked even though the memory chips can easily take it, as our manual overclocking section shows. With those clocks out of the box, the GameRock Premium is 3% faster than the NVIDIA Founders Edition at 1440p, which is not a whole lot. This seems to be a common theme with Turing as overclocked versions really aren't significantly faster than the Founders Edition due to how the power limits work, but more on that later. Compared to the GTX 1080, the RTX 2070 GameRock is 19% faster, and the GTX 1080 Ti is 6% ahead, while the RTX 2080 comes with a 14% performance uplift. AMD's fastest, the Radeon RX Vega 64, is around 20% slower with much more power draw, heat, and noise at the same time. With these performance characteristics, we can recommend the RTX 2070 for 1440p highest details gaming.

Unlike the Founders Edition, Palit's card is a triple-slot design to improve cooling capability. Gaming temperatures are much better than the FE with only 69°C. Noise levels are slightly improved over the Founders Edition, too, but only by 1 dBA. Given these temperatures, my personal preference would have been for Palit to allow slightly higher temperatures in return for even better noise levels. By default, the card doesn't have the highly popular idle-fan-stop feature, which turns off the fans completely in idle and light gaming for a perfect noise-free experience. This functionality is only available through the second BIOS, which can be enabled easily through a switch on the board. The second BIOS runs the same clocks, but has a slightly lower manual power limit adjustment range.

Like all other GeForce RTX 20-series cards, the Palit RTX 2070 GameRock is held back by Turing's power limits despite the addition of an extra 6-pin power connector. While previous generations were limited by GPU temperatures, cards will now sit in their power limit all the time during gaming, which means the highest boost clocks are never reached during regular gameplay. Palit did increase the board power limit from 185 W to 215 W. Even higher values would have definitely helped yield more performance. With 250 W, the manual adjustment range for the power limit is good and matches that of competing cards. The VRM is upgraded to 8-phase as well, so allowing even more power draw out of the box shouldn't have been a problem.

Manual overclocking has once more become more complicated with this generation. Since the cards are always running the power limiter, you can no longer just dial in stable clocks for the highest boost state to find the maximum overclock. The biggest issue is that you can't just reach that state reliably, so your testing is limited to whatever frequency your test load is running at. Nevertheless, we managed to pull through and achieved a good overclock on our RTX 2070 that translated into 8% additional performance. We found overclocking potential of our card to be similar to the Founders Edition and other RTX 2070 cards we tested before.

A unique feature of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX Series is support for ray tracing and DLSS. RTX Technology adds real-time ray-tracing capability in games that support it, while DLSS is a new form of AI-accelerated anti-aliasing that improves performance while still maintaining visual quality that's comparable to other anti-aliasing methods. The adoption rate for both technologies has been much slower than expected, but a lot of developers have pledged support, so these features might actually matter in the coming months. For a few years, AMD has offered support for VESA Adaptive Sync with their cards, while NVIDIA's G-SYNC monitors came with a substantial price increase—this has been addressed now and all NVIDIA cards support Adaptive Sync.

The Palit RTX 2070 GameRock Premium retails at $600, which matches NVIDIA Founders Edition pricing. In return, you get the fan-stop capability, an out of the box overclock, and a much larger, more powerful cooler. Some RTX 2070 models come in at $500, like the EVGA RTX 2070 Black we reviewed a while ago, and compared to those, the $100 price increase feels pretty steep and might be hard to justify for some.