Gigabyte RTX 4070 Ti Gaming OC 12G

Gigabyte has always had a reputation for thinking outside the box, and rightly so. For their RTX4070 Ti Gaming OC 12GB, they've taken advantage of the fact that the board can be made smaller. They've listened to the problem that the adapter for RTX 40 series cards takes up an incredible amount of space in a standard enclosure, so they've embedded it into the card itself. This makes it a little difficult for people like me with fat sausage fingers to get it off again - but on the other hand, the adapter cable doesn't sit and bend unnaturally up against the side panel.

In addition, something more ingenious has been done, and it seems Gigabyte have actually looked at the product instead of heedlessly making whatever card they can like everyone else. This results in the adapter having only two 8-pin connections at the other end, thus taking up, well, a third less space. Brilliant. One does get a little nervous about whether Gigabyte are the only ones to have actually hired an engineer instead of 100% spending every pay check on buying marketing people.

The price is £900 where I could find it cheapest, though a few lucky riders think they should charge over £1,000 for it. It also makes the card among the very cheapest I can find, and very far from the over £1100 that the market's most expensive RTX 4070 Ti costs.

It is of course the same GPU that everyone else is using, Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti, or AD104 as it's called. It's still 4nm-based, with 35.8 billion transistors, 7680 CUDA cores, 240 texture mapping units, 80 ROPs and 240 Tensor cores, as well as 60 RT cores. That's along with 12GB of DDR6X VRAM and a 192-bit interface that can hit a bandwidth of over 504GB/s.

Otherwise there's everything you'd expect; DLSS 3, third generation Ray Tracing cores that are twice as efficient as before, which combined makes the RTX 4070 Ti supposedly deliver three times the frames-per-second of an RTX 3090 Ti in certain special cases. We agree that the RTX 4070 Ti pushes past the 3090 Ti in most cases, but tripling the performance is a bit of an overstatement.

From the factory, the Base Clock is 2310Mhz, while the Boost Clock stands at 2610Mhz. Gigabyte has of course tuned it up to 2640Mhz. I don't understand that the memory interface is only 192-bit, it must be a bit of a bottleneck, but it's not something Nvidia can do anything about.

An anti-sag bracket is included of course. I would have probably preferred a jack like thing as one has used in the past. There's a four year warranty and of course dual BIOS, as well as Windforce cooling system and RGB lights because, well, you just have to, as well as a solid metal plate that acts as both bracing and heat sink.

There are three 100mm fans, an evaporative chamber, and new-school screen cooling, which means there's a draft in the metal backplate. The card is listed for "2 slots" but takes up just a little more than that.

The cooling is efficient, but also a bit louder than we're used to. 48dB we measured, but luckily it's extremely low frequency and I have to admit it didn't make much difference to me, just keeping its 45 degrees at idle and maxing out at 61 degrees, which is really low for an RTX 4070 Ti. It might also be due to a relatively high power consumption of up to 266.9 Watts, which is a lot for this chip.

As always, we tested on an X670E-based AM5 platform, a 7950X CPU and 32GB DDR5 6000 RAM with all applications running from a PCIe 4 NVMe drive.

3D Benchmark

• Time Spy: 21229


• Time Spy Extreme: 11217


• Speed Way: 5439


• Port Royal: 14122

Blender BMW GPU

• 1.02.09

Heaven

• 1080p: 5912


• 1440p: 4335

Total War: Warhammer III

• 1080p: 161,3


• 1440p: 112,1


• 4K: 57,8

Red Dead Redemption 2

• 1080p: 158,45


• 1440p: 126,06


• 4K: 79,05

Dirt 5

• 1080p: 220,4


• 1440p: 177,7


• 4K: 109,4

Assassin's Creed Valhalla

• 1080p: 192


• 1440p: 151


• 4K: 80

Hitman 3 Dubai

• 1080p: 196,84


• 1440p: 187,45


• 4K: 197,34

Far Cry 6

• 1080p: 124


• 1440p: 113


• 4K: 80

Cyberpunk 2077 DLSS 3 Performance

• 1080p: 127,79


• 1440p: 129,61


• 4K: 100,63

So overall, the scores are just a little above the other RTX 4070 Ti card we've tested - but the price is significantly different, and the cooling is the best we've seen, so I'm a little forced to give a better score as this card is minimally better on all counts, and cheaper.

That doesn't change the fact that the RTX 4070 Ti is priced insanely by Nvidia, and yes, it's a good bit cheaper than an RTX 4080, but it also performs a good bit less, but on the other hand AMD's 7900XT series performs even better, and doesn't cost much more. With this Gaming OC card though, the price gap is made larger, so picking up the 4070 Ti makes a bit more sense, but that just doesn't apply to very many editions.