Packaging

The Card

The Zotac GeForce RTX 3070 Twin Edge OC retains the Ice Storm 2 design scheme the company introduced with its RTX 30-series custom-design products. As we mentioned earlier, this is the most compact of the RTX 3070 cards we reviewed so far, but even then, it's both longer and taller than past generations of baseline x70-series designs by Zotac. The card is a good inch taller than the I/O bracket, and the two fans are clearly not of equal size, with the smaller fan 90 mm and the bigger one 100 mm. A metal backplate is included, too.


Dimensions of the card are 23 cm x 14 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a 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.


Unlike the Founders Edition card with its wacky 12-pin connector, the RTX 3070 Twin Edge OC comes with two conventional 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Due to the way the cooler shroud is designed, the power inputs are recessed quite far into the card, which makes it difficult to plug in and out the PCIe power cables. Note that I accidentally bent the heatsink fins near the connectors because I was trying to get the cable plugged in.


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

Teardown

The Zotac GeForce RTX 3070 Twin Edge uses five heatpipes to keep the GPU cool. This part of the heatsink also provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling. It is longer than the PCB, which lets it wrap around and looks great. Three thermal pads are installed to soak up a little bit of heat from the GPU area.