Final words and conclusion
Final words
Palit offers a product that was close to 1% faster than reference, which falls within the baseline of anomalies. The card is a reference product and limited to manual overclocking. The cooling looks great, performs well, but the card is definitely louder than the FE models. As such this might be a harder sell? We'd advise Palit to bring fan ROM a notch down under 39 DBa, with slightly high temps as a tradeoff. As a card noisier than reference just would make a wrong impression. Currently, we have no idea what pricing will be like though, we hope at or around MSRP The 3070 Ti overall is a little lackluster seen from the RTX 3070 in regards to performance and pricing. I mentioned this last week in the 3080 Ti reviews, and I'll say it again in akk the 3070 Ti reviews; it is a bizarre time to write reviews on graphics cards with the shortages and insane price hikes. Really what the market needs are affordable, high-performing graphics cards that sit well under the 500 USD marker. The RTX 3070 Ti does not entirely fall into that category but perhaps is among my personal favorite cards (if you can find one at MSRP). The good news is that this card series and newer NVIDIA SKUs are all hash-rate limited, preventing cryptocurrency miners to dominate sales. The reality however is also that NVIDIA can only fabricate only a certain number of GPUs, and they'll still need to make the call on how much allocation ends up at gamers, and how much is intended for other markets. We hope NVIDIA will make wise decisions priority-wise because if the trend continues then the PC gaming market is bound to die off as what software houses will invest in PC gaming if that market is on a sharp decline?
Performance
Realistically, the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is slightly better than I anticipated at first when the specs arrived, whilst the card sees only a negligible increase in shading cores, the main benefit is the memory type. GDDR6X over DDR6 is making a difference as the card is a bit bandwidth (fillrate) limited for the GPU to do its thing with. The actual volume size of the VRAM partition however is very questionable for a 599 USD card. Up to 2560x1440 you'll be fine even with raytracing and DLSS activated, at Ultra HD however you will be bound to run into limitations a bit faster. But in all fairness, this card is aimed at the 2560x1440 domain, so up to that resolution, you'll be really loving the performance that this card reproduces for you. This card can run games at WQHD quite easily even with raytracing and a DLSS combo; it will serve you well at that resolution. The closest product from the competition would be the Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT. NVIDIA however offers faster raytracing performance and offers you the option to put that into 6th gear with DLSS.
A custom card like the GamignPRO does not bring in additional factory tweaked performance, this will sit at roughly +1% for this model in its out-of-the-box configuration. Palit will offer an OC model though, where you can tweak a few more % out off.
Cooling & noise levels
Depending on the airflow level inside your chassis, expect the card to hit 70 to 75 Degrees C range temperature-wise under hefty load conditions. The card is operating at a moderate noise level. Roughly 41 Dba of noise, that's bearable, considered normal to okay but not silent.
Energy
Heat output and energy consumption are always closely related to each other as (graphics) processors and heat can be perceived as a 1:1 state; 100 Watts in (consumption) often equals 100 Watts of heat as output. This is the basis of TDP. NVIDIA is listing their TGP at 290 Watts, the amount of power the GPU and major components use. We measure the graphics card based on TBP, total board power as you'd easily forget that fans spinning and RGB also draw power. As such in peak load conditions we're hovering at a close to 300 Watt state for typical power draw with peaks. Ampere does peak/spike a little more every now and then in power consumption.
Coil whine
Much like the 3080 and 3090, the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti does exhibit coil squeal. Is it annoying? It's at a level you can hear it. In a closed chassis, that noise would fade away in the background. However, with an open chassis, you can hear coil whine/squeal. Graphics cards all make this in some form, especially at high framerates; this can be perceived.
Pricing
NVIDIA is pricing the reference GeForce RTX 3070 Ti at USD 599, and I'm afraid that's just too much for a graphic card that showed marginally better performance. Sometimes a few percent, be overall roughly 5 to 10% seen from the year-old 3070. Add to that the current state of the market. Please do expect AIB cards to be more expensive, as that is a trend as of late. We expect GamignPRO to hover at Founder edition MSRP as otherwise, this would not be a good buy. The FE model is more silent, offers the sam,e performance and CAN be manually tweaked, these are clear advantages. As to the price. We'll have to wait and see how that pans out, though, as everything is dependant on the actual volume availability of these cards. We can say so little about pricing these days.
Tweaking
Palit has limited the non-OC models on the power limiter, this will restrict your tweaking potential. Overall we can state that all cards, and really it doesn't matter which brand that will be, can get you an extra 5% performance once tweaked. This is calculated by NVIDIA, with small margins here and there based on ASIC and memory quality. For the RTX 3070 Ti series, we'd expect you to add and reach 500~1000 MHz on the memory subsystem (Gbps / effective bandwidth). The GPU clock can be increased anywhere from +50 to +125 MHz. Why this huge differential, you might wonder? Well, results will vary per board, brand, and even card due to cooling (GDDR6X/GPU/VRM), but also ASIC quality. I will say this, though, and frequency matters LESS these days. Even if the GPU could do 2050~2100 MHz, your power limiter will be the decisive and dominant factor, lowering that clock frequency to meets its assigned power budget.
Conclusion
Complex, that's what the 3070 Ti series is. The MSRP already is too high for my taste, and I am afraid that a card as limited as this one is for tweaking, and with worse acoustics than FE, would only make sense if it is really cheap. And I just don't know what the final pricing for this product will be like. We're talking about a 2560x1440 resolution targeted graphics card, now costing likely 699 USD or more (we honestly don't know the final etailer pricing at this point). When you blindly stare at the marginal increase of 256 Shader cores you might feel indifferent in the fact that the product would not make enough difference. NVIDIA did make the right call to move the GDDR6X though, the overall performance is there as the older 3070 memory was somewhat bandwidth limited. We're just not sure it makes a substantial enough differential. It turns out that the reconfigured product yields suitable numbers, especially in the WQHD resolution domain where this card is targeted at. 8GB however is going to become more troublesome in Ultra HD, albeit that's still a relativistic statement to make as this card is not aimed at that monitor resolution. As an overall package of hard- and software the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti performs well on all fronts, performance, cooling, and acoustics. Palit has a nice-looking and solid offering. However they need to place more focus on better performance cooling, the temps are fine, however, 41 DBa in this day and era is a little too much, especially in the price range. Now don't see it as too negative, contrary, as years ago this was a fairly normal acoustics level. The problem is appeal combined with limited tweakability. But hey, overall a nice looking product, offering reference performance level gaming. You can't really complain about that.
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