Palit GeForce RTX 3070

NVIDIA released the GeForce RTX 3070 just six weeks ago, and today, we're reviewing the Palit RTX 3070 JetStream OC. I had the review mostly finished, but couldn't get the last bits done because of the RX 6800 XT and RTX 3060 Ti launches. Out of the box, Palit has overclocked their RX 3070 JetStream OC to a rated boost clock of 1815 MHz, which is a 90 MHz increase over the Founders Edition. This turns into a real-life performance gain of 2%—not a whole lot, but other custom designs are similar. On average, at 1440p, we found the JetStream OC to be 2% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti, 15% ahead of the RTX 3060 Ti, and 53% faster than the RTX 2070, which is pretty nice. The RTX 3080 is 21% faster, at 30% higher pricing. AMD's Radeon RX 6800 is only 4% faster than the Palit JetStream, at higher MSRP.

Nice job Palit, we like it. Where the 3080 and 3090 mostly sit at a price level that many can't or are willing to afford, the sub 500 US price bracket we feel is where it begins (but still a lot of money). Overall the RTX 3070 series cannibalizes the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti domain and territory. So from that perspective, you quite honestly just cannot go wrong here. The predicament at launch as said will be actual availability. And if you do not buy through Nvidia or an NVIDIA assigned e-tailer, the prices will go up due to shortages. Is the price higher than say 550 USD? Then you as a consumer should absolutely refuse that, seriously don't buy at prices over 500~500 USD, WAIT until there is volume availability as retailers and etailers will otherwise rip that wallet of your empty. That said and done, there's little to report otherwise that is negative about the graphics card, super performance combined with fitting cooling and acoustics is what you'll get. And next to that, it's just a nice looking graphics card, isn't it?. Now we can argue about the nature and choice of an 8GB GDDR6 framebuffer, but in most use cases it's enough and we understand the choice made here, NVIDIA needs to keep that bill of materials healthy, as otherwise, this 499 USD card would have easily been 650 USD based on that 16GB decision. With future games in mind, this will turn out to become a WQHD (2560x1440) resolution card, and with current games, you can quite easily play Ultra HD games, in that domain, it shines whether that is using shading (regular rendered games) or when using hybrid ray-tracing + DLSS as that combo will offer a very decent performance. Palit did it correctly, you could perhaps argue the need for triple-fan cooling over dual-fan, but as you have been able to see the temperatures are under control and the silent mode quite silent. Of course people like 60 Degrees over 70 Defrees C in temperature, but for the GPU that doesn't really matter, it's just that we all consider that cooler = better. Palit ticks the right boxes with the Jetstream model. I mean 37 or 40 DBA depending on dual BIOS choice, then the nice looks as well as a product that already has been clocked at a boost frequency of 1815 MHz for you. You really cannot complain there. The performance you gain from any 3070 of course also is nice, for 500 bucks you sit at that RTX 2080 TI performance level, and that is not a bad deal. Overall you'll run 3 to 4% faster than reference and when tweaked you can further extend that. This is something we definitely can recommend (if priced right and if available of course).

Palit's dual-fan interpretation of RTX 3070 isn't perfect, yet it delivers on the performance front and right now the manufacturer needs to do only one thing to guarantee sales: get it on shelves.