ASUS GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER

ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER OC is the company's premium custom design rendition of the new RTX 4070 SUPER performance segment GPU launched by NVIDIA today. Within the product lineup, ASUS positions the TUF Gaming series above its DUAL OC series, and a notch below the ROG Strix series. The TUF Gaming series, over the past couple of generations, has evolved into a high-quality product design thanks to its industrial looks, and minimal cooler shroud that allows more of the heatsink to be exposed, for greater airflow. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER is part of a mid lifecycle refresh of the RTX 40-series Ada, focusing on the higher end of the product stack. The RTX 4070 SUPER starts selling today, and is recommended by NVIDIA for 1440p gaming with maxed out settings, including ray tracing; although in the real world, the RTX 4070 series cards have been tested to be capable of 4K Ultra HD at fairly good frame rates, which you can further improve by spending some time around your game's settings, getting GeForce Experience to find the right ones; or taking advantage of DLSS technologies, including the latest DLSS 3 Frame Generation.

The MSRP cards we tested yesterday were an impressive start to the new RTX 4070 Super series, which saw performance improve about 10-20 FPS pretty much across the board, with an uplift in ray tracing, DLSS and other features performance too, but best of all, it did all that while still hitting the same MSRP of the older model. However, they were all MSRP cards yesterday, and this ASUS model is a fair bit more expensive. Gigabyte’s card was another £50 on top of MSRP, but better quality and performance justify that. For AASUS it’s another £125 and that is a lot of money no matter which way you look at it. ASUS are typically the most expensive brand anyway, just because, it’s the ASUS tax, and it’s been a thing for as long as I can remember. However, it’s not all just lighting money on fire, as this is technically a much better card than the MSRP cards, and even more robust than the premium Gigabyte card. There are upgraded capacitors, chokes and a more robust VRM overall, there’s a more premium thick metal shroud with a gorgeous sandblasted gun-metal finish, a full-metal backplate, a much heavier and more robust heatsink, better fans, and the card is just simply bigger too. It’s not hard to see where the extra investment is going, and if you’re ragging your card to its limits all day and night long, you can bet this one will be more stable than most thanks to the upgraded hardware.

The ASUS RTX 4070 Super Dual is designed to be sold at the NVIDIA baseline MSRP of $600, which means it doesn't come with as many bells and whistles as other, more expensive, custom designs. Clock speeds are set to match the NVIDIA Founders Edition, you do get a dual BIOS with quiet mode and a more powerful triple-slot cooling solution. Averaged over the 25 games in our test suite, at 1440p, we find the ASUS RTX 4070 Super Dual 15% faster than the RTX 4070 non-Super, which is a pretty substantial improvement for a refresh—unlike what Intel did with their 14th Gen Raptor Lake. This means that the card is able to match last generation's RTX 3090 flagship, and the gap to RTX 4070 Ti shrinks to just 7%. RTX 4070 Ti benefits from its higher power limit of 285 W, too. While AMD's Radeon RX 7800 XT was a bit faster than RTX 4070 in pure raster scenarios, this has changed with the RTX 4070 Super, which is now 8% faster—an important goal that NVIDIA achieved successfully. The gap to RTX 4080 is still pretty big with +30%, likely the reason why NVIDIA is launching the RTX 4070 Ti Super, and RTX 4080 Super, to cover strategically important points in that segment.