Packaging

The Card

PNY's design is very interesting. To keep cost down, the main cooler and backplate are both made out of plastic. On top of the fan assembly, a metal plate has been installed, which greatly improves the look and feel of the product because of the metal surface structure. However, a tiny bit of airflow is lost due to this design element.


Dimensions of the card are 29.5 x 11.5 cm, and it weighs 1071 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4 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.


The card has two 8-pin power inputs. This configuration is rated for up to 375 W of power draw.


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

Teardown

PNY's heatsink uses four heatpipes to keep the card cool. Note how the cooling assembly also has thermal pads to cool the voltage regulation circuitry and memory chips.


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