Introduction

Back in September, NVIDIA launched its GeForce RTX 20-series graphics card family with the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. Close to a month later, the company launched its third-fastest card in the family, the GeForce RTX 2070. This is an important product for NVIDIA because even at a relatively steep price of $500, it is the most affordable one offering real-time ray tracing in games, or at least a semblance of it. The RTX 2070 is being offered for the vast bulk of gamers that play at 1440p resolution or lower.

NVIDIA has also made certain interesting design choices for the RTX 2070. Predecessors of this card, such as the GTX 1070 and GTX 970, have been based on the same chips as the SKU just above them, such as the GTX 1080 and GTX 980. NVIDIA is basing the RTX 2070 on its third-largest "Turing" chip, the TU106, instead of the TU104.



It's important to mention here, though, that TU106 isn't exactly a successor of chips in the same way as the GP106 or GM206. While those two have exactly half the muscle of the GP104 or GM204 respectively, the TU106 is half of the top-dog TU102 instead of the TU104. This chip also gets the same 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, which is unchanged from the TU104. The philosophy behind the TU106 may have been to design a lean chip that is cheaper to build for the simple fact that it has a smaller die size than the TU104.

Today, we are reviewing the ASUS GeForce RTX 2070 STRIX OC, which is an overclocked custom design variant of the RTX 2070. It comes with a medium-sized overclock and features a large triple-slot, triple-fan thermal solution.

The ASUS RTX 2070 STRIX OC is currently listed online for $630.