Introduction

PNY GeForce RTX 4070 XLR8 is the company's premium custom-design graphics card based on NVIDIA's most affordable RTX 40-series Ada graphics card to date. The RTX 4070 is gunning to be the best-selling graphics model in the crucial Spring-Summer PC shopping season, where people upgrade their rigs for the break. XLR8 (pronounced "accelerate"), is PNY's premium gamer-focused brand of graphics cards, PC memory, and SSDs. You can expect all the bells and whistles of a high-end graphics card, including RGB LED lighting, a powerful VRM setup with more tuning headroom, and high-end product design in general.

The GeForce RTX 4070 is designed to dominate maxed-out AAA gaming at resolutions of up to 1440p, and high refresh-rate e-sports gameplay up to that resolution. It is very much capable of 4K Ultra HD gaming, but that requires dialing down some eye-candy, or judiciously using DLSS or the newer DLSS 3 Frame Generation feature, something that previous-generation high-end graphics cards being cleared out of stores around the $700-mark, lack. As a performance-segment graphics card, the RTX 4070 is also significantly more power-efficient than previous-gen high-end GPUs.



The GeForce Ada graphics architecture debuts the 3rd generation of NVIDIA RTX, the path breaking consumer graphics technology that combines real-time ray traced elements with conventional raster 3D graphics, to significantly improve gaming realism. Ada introduces significantly faster CUDA cores that run at higher clock speeds; 3rd generation RT cores with even more ray intersection performance that reduces the performance impact of enabling ray tracing; and 4th generation Tensor cores that support newer math formats.

The GeForce RTX 4070 is carved out of the same 5 nm AD104 silicon as the RTX 4070 Ti, but while the Ti maxes it out, the RTX 4070 is significantly cut down, featuring just 46 out of 60 streaming multiprocessors (SM) physically present, which works out to 5,888 CUDA cores, 184 Tensor cores, 46 RT cores, and 184 TMUs. The ROP count has been reduced to 64 from 80, although thankfully, the memory sub-system remains untouched. You get the same 12 GB of 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory across a 192-bit memory bus, which the RTX 4070 Ti has.

The PNY RTX 4070 XLR8 is priced at $650, a $50 premium over the NVIDIA MSRP, which is why it did not feature among yesterday's reviews. The card in this review is the non-OC variant of the RTX 4070 XLR8, which sticks to NVIDIA-reference clock speeds, with the price-premium covering for more features, such as RGB and superior VRM. There is an even pricier XLR8 OC Edition card that's priced slightly higher. With the RTX 4070, NVIDIA allowed its board partners to opt for the legacy 8-pin PCIe power connector instead of the modern 16-pin 12VHPWR. PNY chose the former, which should fit the 200 W typical graphics power (TGP) for the RTX 4070, and even provide the convenience of the more familiar power connector.