This is actually my first PNY review. I'd like to thank them for the opportunity to review the GeForce RTX 3070 XLR8 Revel Epic-X RGB. PNY has been making NVIDIA graphics cards for many years and are the exclusive provider for NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla Professional graphics solutions. In the past, most of their GeForce graphics cards were very close to the NVIDIA reference design implementation, usually produced in Palit's factories.

With the RTX 3070 XLR8 Revel Epic-X RGB, PNY is seeking to more closely address the needs of gamers, and an important feature addition is the support for RGB lighting. While I'm sure there is a system behind PNY's naming scheme, I still find it much too complicated, and to most, the name will just feel like a sequence of cool words the product designers came up with. At least they're not using "Gaming" in their naming scheme, like most other companies—what else would you use such a graphics card for?

Despite the looks and positioning of the RTX 3070 XLR8, PNY has decided to operate their card at the NVIDIA reference settings, which puzzles me. I can't see any reason not to include even a small factory overclock; the cooler can definitely take it, more on that later. At default settings, the PNY RTX 3070 matches the NVIDIA Founders Edition performance almost exactly, small deviations are due to limited repeatability and measurement accuracy in the benchmarks. Overall, the GeForce RTX 3070 is a fantastic card that offers amazing performance, especially when you consider its "x70" positioning. On average, at 1440p, we found the PNY RTX 3070 to be 1% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti, 11% ahead of the RTX 3060 Ti, and 50% faster than the RTX 2070, which is pretty nice. The RTX 3080 is 23% faster, at higher pricing. AMD's Radeon RX 6800 is only 6% faster and usually costs more than PNY's card. Compared to last week's release, the RTX 3060, the RTX 3070 is 50% faster—a huge performance gap.

With those performance numbers, the RTX 3070 is the perfect choice for the huge 1440p gamer crowd, but the card also has enough muscle to run many titles at 4K 60 FPS, especially if you are willing to dial down settings a little bit. The RTX 3070 is also a great choice for 1080p Full HD if you want to drive a high-refresh-rate monitor with 120 or 144 Hz. For just 1080p 60 Hz, it's overkill unless next-gen titles go overboard with their hardware requirements, which is highly unlikely. NVIDIA launched the RTX 3060 Ti just recently, which is a decent alternative for these scenarios, too, but falls behind a little bit in performance; especially when betting on RTX should you be tempted to consider the RTX 3070.

In our apples-to-apples heatsink testing, we found out that the PNY RTX 3070 XLR8 heatsink is a very good design that can easily outperform coolers from Gigabyte, Palit, Zotac, and even the RTX 3070 Founders Edition. That's why it's not surprising to see fantastic temperatures on PNY's card, only 66°C under full load. Unfortunately, this results in slightly higher fan noise than necessary, but with 33 dBA, the card isn't loud at all, just "well audible." Still, for RTX 2080 Ti performance levels, that's a great achievement, especially considering PNY's limited experience in the premium aftermarket segment. While I can understand the desire for low temperatures, especially since it's easy to quantify and compare, I would have tuned the fans slightly differently. Allowing temperature to be a little bit higher would have let them run the cooler much quieter without affecting the lifespan or RMA rates in any significant way. NVIDIA has introduced fan stop on their Founders Edition with Ampere, which means all board partners are expected to adopt this crucial feature, too. Outside of gaming, the fans on the PNY RTX 3070 will shut off completely for the perfect noise-free experience.

The card's OC potential ended up a bit lower compared to other cards, but the difference aren't huge. What's worth mentioning is that since the card is clocked at reference speeds, the gains from overclocking are much higher—we almost saw a 10% performance improvement from overclocking alone, especially the memory overclocked very well. Expert overclockers will be held back a little bit, though, because the manual power-limit adjustment range goes up to only 250 W. I'm convinced PNY's cooler and VRM circuitry could easily handle more power, maybe they'll release an OC BIOS with higher power limit later on, like EVGA did for some SKUs.

Making comments on pricing is kinda impossible at this time because everything is out of stock at the moment. On eBay and other platforms, scalpers have put up listings at terrible prices that aren't reflective of a realistic price point either. PNY has quoted a €500 MSRP including taxes, which converts to $500 without taxes and matches the NVIDIA Founders Edition. At that price, the card would be a fantastic deal for its excellent performance, great price/performance, and good cooler. The only drawback is its higher noise output compared to the Founders Edition because of its more aggressive fan profile, which is easily fixed with a manual fan curve. The cooler itself is more powerful than the FE heatsink. Right now, with pricing being crazy, I would look long and hard before I overspent on any graphics card. Considering we spent well over $1000 for the RTX 2080 Ti last year and the RTX 3070 is faster than it already sets some constraints. I updated our price/performance chart engine to show additional theoretical price points, and where that would land the card in our ranking. Interesting alternatives to the RTX 3070 are the Radeon RX 6800, which is slightly faster, but has worse raytracing performance since the 16 GB VRAM makes no difference, a used RTX 2080 Ti if you can find it at good pricing, and maybe even the RTX 3060 Ti if you can live with slightly lower performance. Let's hope that supply normalizes soon so you can get your hands on some new graphics hardware.