Tech enthusiasts typically adore miniaturization, but companies have always found it tricky to make compact PCs that retain the most important aspects of a traditional desktop. An interesting new approach to this conundrum that caused a blip on our radar is the Wee Beastie Super Mini Fishtank PC on Kickstarter.

In essence, this pleasingly compact (4.75-liter) PC comes with a desktop RTX 4070 GPU installed, but it is supported by choice mobile components such as (up to) a Core Ultra 7 255H, 2x SODIMM RAM sticks, and a 1TB M.2 2230 NVMe SSD. There isn’t a big wall wart PSU outside the case, either; this design has a 400W unit in the chassis.

We aren’t saying that the Wee Beastie Super Mini Fishtank PC is the first PC maker to take this approach of cherry-picking between desktop and mobile parts for a sweet spot compact PC build, but it might get a lot of choices right. Check the specs, and see if it is right for you:

Stand out specs, beyond the processing power and size of this device, are the number of video outs and having the latest Wi-Fi 7 on board. It is also great to have a USB4 port for fast external storage and dock solutions.

Read our extensive review of the RTX 4070 to get some insight into what this desktop graphics card can achieve. However, we must point out that, according to the project FAQ, this graphics card isn’t interchangeable with any other you might grab from a retailer.

It is not a standard desktop graphics card inside

Though it looks like there may be a standard graphics card in the fish tank, in the FAQ, the makers clarify, “The Wee Beastie doesn't have the full sized 4070 graphics card that you would normally buy from the store and install into your full sized PC. It actually has the 4070 GPU processing chip that’s mounted on the circuit board along with all the other components needed to make it work. You would not be able to remove the 4070 from the Wee Beastie and plug and play it in another computer.” We think it uses an RTX 4070 desktop GPU on an MXM card.

Hopefully, the partnered 13700H (14C/20T, up to 5.0 GHz) or Ultra 7 255H (16C/16T and up to 5.1 GHz) won’t dampen the desktop GPU’s vigor.

One of the best things about a pre-built like this is the neatness, integration, and off-the-peg action readiness. According to its makers, the Wee Beastie Super Mini Fishtank PC is also “whisper quiet under load and prevents thermal throttling,” which directly addresses a lot of typical Mini PC concerns. According to the specs, there are “13 high performance fans” in this system, so decent air circulation should be taken for granted, if not its quietness.

Some will also find the Wee Beastie Super Mini Fishtank PC to be quite handsome. Videos and images shared by the device maker show the build is clean and clutter-free. The RGB lighting looks cool, too. Some images even show the fish tank case being used to show off some figurines (inside).

One of the most horrifyingly burned graphics cards that we have seen has been featured in a components salvage video. Software developer and hobbyist graphics card repairer Patryk runs the DIY Repair Hour YouTube channel, where work on this seriously charred Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 was uploaded.

It is worth highlighting that this isn't a GPU from a house fire or other external 'act of God' style catastrophe. The card apparently set on fire in a working PC which suffered from a power connector issue. Patryk was told that the PSU in use was from a mining rig, and this PSU didn't have the luxury of overcurrent protection (OCP), so the combustion of the power connector and ensuing electrical mayhem didn't cut the power delivery. From the video comments, it seems to be that the RTX 4070 owner was alerted of the burning card by "the horrible smell."

Patryk's conclusion is that the burning "certainly started at or near the 12V PCIE connector." So Nvidia's compact, concentrated power connector isn't completely blameless here. However, using a PSU without basic safety features like OCP was an obvious issue, allowing this unfortunate event to go much further than it should have. In fact, we can't even see any remnants of the controversial power connector, as the combustion was so intense.

As this Palit RTX 4070 was so far gone, Patryk and the graphics card owner had no illusions about its repairability. From the start, the mission here was to simply salvage any good components that remained on the PCB.

Fast forwarding to the end of the video, you will learn that the biggest and most expensive component here, the GPU die, is claimed to be "healthy." The TechTuber verified this with a multitude of multimeter measurements. Sadly, we didn't see the GPU put onto a working PCB to confirm it was AOK, though.

Other components salvaged from this charred mess include a selection of memory chips, power stages, video BIOS, some ports, and other things. Patryk didn't verify all these bits were 100% good, but assumed they would be fine as they were further away from the fire zone than the GPU core.

If there's a lesson to be learned here, it is that yes-indeed pay attention to your tricky Nvidia GPU power connector - but don't neglect using an appropriate and high quality PSU.

At CES, AMD unveiled its Ryzen AI 300 flagship lineup codenamed Strix Halo with a beastly configuration of 16 cores, 40 Compute Units, and 128GB of unified memory. New first-party benchmarks assert that the top-end Ryzen AI Max+ 395 - that's a mouthful - is up to 68% faster than Nvidia's RTX 4070 mobile graphics in gaming. The slides also showcase how Strix Halo holds up versus Apple's M4-series chips in productivity and even dare to mention the desktop RTX 4090.

Strix Halo is split into three dies with two CCDs offering eight cores each and a large I/O die housing the iGPU (Integrated GPU) and the NPU. The highest-end Ryzen AI Max+ 395 packs 16 cores and 32 central processor threads based on the Zen 5 architecture, accompanied by the Radeon 8060S iGPU with 40 RDNA 3.5 Compute Units. All the AI Max chips have a base TDP of 55W, and can be configured from 45W to 120W. Surrounding the chip is up to 128GB of unified memory, which can be allocated in varying pools (up to 96GB) to the iGPU alone.

With the specs out of the way, let's talk performance. The Nvidia comparison system is the Asus ROG Flow Z13 with the i9-13900H and the RTX 4070 mobile (65W TGP). Across a suite of 17 games at 1080p high settings, Strix Halo handily bests its Nvidia equivalent, with an up to 68% lead in Borderlands 3, per AMD. Being first-party benchmarks, we shouldn't take them at face value. It is also prudent to mention that the RTX 4070 mobile can be configured up to 115W, but a 65W variant features in this comparison, due to the Asus ROG Flow Z13 design.

In productivity tests, Blender sees the 395+ blaze past the Core Ultra 9 288V (Lunar Lake) by 302% but that isn't an apples-to-apples comparison since the latter is a 17/30W chip. Versus Apple's M4 Pro, AMD touts an 86% lead in V-Ray, dropping to 12% in Cinebench R24. Moving over to AI performance, the XDNA 2 NPU enables the Ryzen AI MAX series to dish out 50 TOPS of AI performance, exceeding the Lunar Lake and Snapdragon X Elite series by two TOPS. AMD also claims its Strix Halo APUs can deliver 2.2x more tokens per second than the RTX 4090 when running the Llama 70B LLM (Large Language Model) at 1/6th the TDP (75W).

We highly suggest you wait for independent testing before jumping the gun, like perhaps pre-ordering a Strix Halo device. These laptops are likely to target enthusiasts as suitable alternatives to dedicated GPU options. With Strix Point laptops still costing over $1,000, pricing will play a key role in determining if Strix Halo can displace dedicated mid-ranged laptop GPUs like the RTX 4070 can be found in.

Welcome to 2025, and if you're looking for a gaming laptop to play the latest games on with high settings and not having to sell an organ to pay for it, then check out this fantastic price on an RTX 4070-powered gaming laptop from HP. With a reasonably-sized 16.1-inch display and 8-core AMD processor, this gaming laptop from HP features a dedicated Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics card to power your games. It might not break any records for performance, but at this low price, it's a great option for a gaming laptop on a budget and rewards a lot of bang for the buck.

Available at Best Buy for just $849, the HP Victus 16 (model: A1SV3UA#ABA) is the perfect option if you're looking to pick up a gaming laptop for an affordable price. You're getting a great deal with this 2024 model with features that include a 16.1-inch IPS display with an FHD (1920 x 1080 pixel) resolution, AMD Ryzen 7-8845HS processor, Nvidia RTX 4070 laptop GPU, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 512GB SSD for your operating system and games library.

We've reviewed the HP Victus 16 - and found the laptop to have excellent battery life, a comfortable keyboard, a bright 300-nit display, and an attractive design. This Laptop is the 16.1-inch model and features many of the same specifications and the same design, albeit with less powerful components.

The negatives to this budget gaming laptop are the smaller-sized 512GB SSD and the lower resolution FHD screen. The computer is user-upgradeable and can support up to 2TB of SSD storage, which can be easily upgraded, but the screen can't be changed. Still, the benefit of the 1920 x 1080 pixel IPS panel is that it won't drain your laptop battery as quickly as an OLED high-res screen, so there's more time for gaming, and of course, you can always connect the laptop to a monitor.

Don't forget to look at our Best Buy coupon codes for January 2025 and see if you can save on today's deal or other products at Best Buy.

The first Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics cards packing slower GDDR6 VRAM have started to trickle through to U.S. e-tailers. Specifically, the Asus Dual GeForce RTX 4070 12GB GDDR6 Evo graphics card is now listed on Newegg at $569.99. However, there’s a problem; it isn't just that it is out of stock. You might as well ignore this release, for now, as for the same price you can purchase the GDDR6X version (black). Moreover, bargain hunters might prefer Asus’s white GDDR6X OC version, as it is currently on offer for $554.99, undercutting its newer but slower stablemate by $15.

We first learned of an RTX 4070 packing slower GDDR6 memory in early August, when Galax mentioned the specification change. It was teasing a new ‘OC 2X’ product that would use this updated configuration. At the time, we mentioned the 5% memory bandwidth disadvantage the new GDDR6 cards were likely to have.

Later in August, Nvidia went official with the RTX 4070 GDDR6. We were pleased to see it officially confirmed that no other spec downgrade would afflict the new SKUs. Nvidia’s official word on why the new SKUs would exist was that it would  "improve supply and availability to meet strong demand."

To recap, the only difference between the GDDR6X and GDDR6 SKUs concerns the type and speed rating of the memory chips soldered to the PCB. The original GDDR6X variant uses 21 Gbps GDDR6X chips, but the GDDR6 models will sport 20 Gbps GDDR6 chips. All else being equal, this reduces memory bandwidth from 504 GB/s to 480 GB/s on the new cards, so a cut of approx 5% (-4.75% if you must).

As we mentioned at the time of the official announcement, no enthusiast will want a slower product at the same price, so Nvidia and its partners should deliver at least a small price cut (5% at least) to make opting for a GDDR6 model sensible. However, in the worst-case scenario, RTX 4070 fanciers might not have GDDR6X options in the coming months, if they are phased out.

Back to the present day, and it doesn’t look worthwhile pre-ordering the Asus Dual GeForce RTX 4070 12GB GDDR6 Evo graphics card from Newegg right now unless you are a reviewer, collector, or other niche user. The Asus Dual GeForce RTX 4070 GDDR6X model is the same price, and the white model of the same card actually undercuts the new GDDR6 version. Whichever you buy you will be eligible for a free copy of Star Wars Outlaws.

Please read our review of the original RTX 4070 here. For some perspective, check out where it sits among the current best graphics cards.

Zotac will not charge extra for custom versions of its GeForce RTX 40-series Super graphics cards that come with enhanced coolers and will sell them at Nvidia's recommended retail prices, the company announced on its website (as noticed by @momomo_us). Meanwhile, the company's factory-overclocked graphics cards will be sold at a premium given their higher performance. 

Zotac will offer Trinity Black Edition and Twin Edge versions of its GeForce RTX 4070 Super, GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super, and GeForce RTX 4080 Super graphics cards at Nvidia-set MSRPs: $599, $799, and $999, respectively. Meanwhile, factory-overclocked Trinity Black Edition OC, Trinity White Edition OC, Twin Edge OC, and AMP-badged graphics boards will be sold at a premium, the company announced. All of these boards — pre-overclocked or not — are contenders to join the ranks of the best graphics cards available today. 

Although AMD and Nvidia offer reference designs for almost all of their graphics cards to speed up time-to-market, add-in-boards (AIBs) manufacturers, such as Zotac, tend to develop custom cards for two reasons: to differentiate themselves from their rivals with better looks and higher performance as well as to cut down costs. 

Given the fact that factory-overclocked versions of Trinity Black Edition and Twin Edge will use the same printed circuit boards and cooling systems as their counterparts that function at Nvidia-recommended frequencies, it does not look like regular versions were designed with the sole purpose of cutting down costs. As a result, regular Trinity Black Edition and Twin Edge models will likely feature decent overclocking potential (courtesy of a refined PCB and an enhanced cooling system), which makes them a good deal, assuming that they will be available at MSRP. 

Meanwhile, those who want to have enhanced performance right out of box and some further overclocking potential will be able to buy Zotac's GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super AMP Holo 16GB GDDR6X or GeForce RTX 4080 Super AMP Extreme Airo 16GB GDDR6X that promise to feature significantly improved clocks and a refined coolers.

Gigabyte is prepping four GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card designs, with only the WindForce and Eagle models shipping with standard 8-pin auxiliary PCIe power connectors, while the Gaming and Aero models will have 12VHPWR 16-pin connectors. All four designs will have three fans, based on the leaked images. 

One of the things that strikes the eye with the pictures of the upcoming GeForce RTX 4070 graphics cards from Gigabyte, Palit, MSI, and Zotac is that most of them are triple-wide with a massive cooling system, just as my colleague Mark reported yesterday about the hoard of MSI's GeForce RTX 4070 AIBs.

While it is not particularly surprising that many of GeForce RTX 4070-based graphics cards will be huge, considering the overclocking potential of the GPU that powers them, it is reasonable to expect more compact AIBs too. This is perhaps where MSI's GeForce RTX 4070 Ventus 2X comes into play. The board features a dual-fan two-wide cooling system and will likely fit into most of PCs used by gamers. Of course, different GeForce RTX boards feature different power connections, some keep using well-proven eight-pin plugs, while others employ the all-new 12VHPWR.

Apparently, budget-friendly options from Zotac and Palit will also have dual-fan designs and 12GB of GDDR6X memory, yet take the information with a grain of salt as this comes from unofficial sources.

Prices for Nvidia's three upcoming GeForce RTX 40 Super GPUs have been leaked by X user @Zed__Wang, who has a decent track record with predicting specifications of Nvidia GPUs, like the RTX 4060 Ti for example. This price leak, if true, reveals that not all three RTX 40 Super graphics cards will sport especially attractive price tags. This is particularly true for the RTX 4080 Super, which is apparently going to launch at $999.

The GeForce RTX 40 Super series revives the Super brand that was only used previously to refresh the Turing GPU series in 2019. Back then, Super basically meant offering new price points and performance levels with a much better bang for buck than the original RTX 20 / GTX 16 lineup. We'd expect to see the same with the RTX 40 series, and leaked hardware specs indicate that at least the performance side of the equation makes sense. The RTX 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, and RTX 4080 Super all are rumored to come with more cores. 

As with all rumors, there's just one caveat: take it with a grain of salt. You won't even have to wait that long to get all this from the horse's mouth, as Nvidia's CES 2024 presentation and the presumed reveal of the RTX 40 Super series is tomorrow, January 8, at 8 AM Pacific time.

*Specifications are unconfirmed.

Prices actually haven't changed all that much from the original Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 series cards, with the RTX 4070 Super and 4070 Ti Super staying at $599 and $799 respectively. The GeForce RTX 4080 Super sees a price drop of $200, bringing it down to $999. By contrast, the GeForce RTX 20 Super series actually brought with it a slight increase in MSRPs with the RTX 2060 Super and 2070 Super.

The prices put into perspective how substantial these upgrades are. The RTX 4070 Super has the biggest CUDA core boost with a 21% increase, and since the price hasn't changed, in theory that means its value (performance per dollar) should also go up by around 21%. The RTX 4070 Ti Super only has a 10% increase in CUDA core amount, but it also comes with 4GB more VRAM, which is harder to quantify in terms of value.

The GeForce RTX 4080 Super also seems like a slam dunk despite its paltry 5% increase in CUDA cores, all thanks to that $200 discount. Though, it's worth considering that the original RTX 4080's $1,199 MSRP was already pretty high, and even higher than AMD's flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX with 24GB of memory at $999. Retail pricing of the RTX 4080 has dropped to roughly $1,100 while the 7900 XTX has dropped to a little over $900. Slotting in the RTX 4080 Super at $999 isn't earth-shattering, at least on paper.

Like with the original GeForce RTX 20 Super series, it seems the stars of the show in the RTX 40 Super lineup are the cheaper two models. The RTX 4070 Super is nearly on par with the RTX 4070 Ti, while the RTX 4070 Ti Super is like a mini-RTX 4080. AMD will definitely have to revisit its $599 RX 7800 XT and maybe even the RX 7900 XT, which retails for around $800 these days.

Maxsun may not be the world's most recognizable graphics cards brand mostly because its products are generally sold in China, but its MegaGamer (MGG) series add-in-boards have gained some international recognition due to their remarkable design. Recently the company introduced its most affordable MGG product to date, the GeForce RTX 4070 MGG OC12G that continues to use a cooling system with five fan and promises great overclocking potential.

The Maxsun GeForce RTX 4070 MGG OC12G s based on the AD104 graphics processor with 5888 CUDA cores clocked at up to 2580 MHz (up from 2475 MHz recommended by Nvidia). The graphics card comes with 12 GB of GDDR6X memory featuring a 21 GT/s data transfer rate. The graphics card is rated for 215W thermal graphics power, which is slightly higher compared to 200W recommended by Nvidia. Meanwhile, the board has a 12VHPWR power connector that can deliver significantly more than 215W of power to the board.

The key selling point of Maxsun's MegaGamer GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card is its three-wide cooling system featuring nine heatpipes, a vapor chamber, and as many as five fans: two 110-mm fans, one 100-mm fan, and two small fan on top of the board. These extra fans are meant to maximize cooling performance and therefore improve overclockability of the graphics board. Whether or not they have a significant impact is another question though, but certainly an overkill cooling system with a vapor chamber will make the MegaGamer GeForce RTX 4070 more expensive than other AIBs based on the same GPU.

When it comes to display outputs, the Maxsun GeForce RTX 4070 MGG OC12G has three DisplayPorts and one HDMI output.

On paper, the Maxsun GeForce RTX 4070 MGG OC12G  looks like an interesting piece of hardware that could be one of the best graphics cards around. Unfortunately, the only way to get it is from JD.com, where Maxsun GeForce RTX 4070 MGG OC12G is priced at ¥5,299 ($661 without sales tax).

HandBrake Team this week released HandBrake 1.7.0 which adds support for hardware-accelerated AV1 transcoding on the latest graphics processors from AMD and Nvidia. As a result, HandBrake 1.7.0 now supports hardware-accelerated AV1 transcoding on all popular modern GPUs, including those from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. In addition, the new version of HandBrake also quadruples the performance of SVT-AV1 encoding on Apple Silicon-based Macs thanks to CPU optimizations. 

Starting from version 1.7.0, HandBrake supports the AMD VCN AV1 encoder that is used by AMD's Radeon 7000-series graphics processors (RDNA 3), as well as the Nvidia 8th Gen NVENC encoder built into GeForce 40-series (Ada Lovelace) graphics chips. Both these GPU families are used in some of the best graphics cards. Previously HandBrake 1.6.0 gained support for Intel's Xe AV1 encoder supported by Xe and Arc-branded GPUs. Therefore, HandBrake can take advantage of hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding on all popular contemporary GPUs, except those integrated into Apple Silicon processors. 

HandBrake is one of the world's most popular transcoding programs. Its main advantage is that it supports virtually all widespread codecs on all hardware and software platforms. HandBrake's software-based SVT-AV1 is a very efficient encoder that supports all kinds of CPUs, which means that HandBrake can run on virtually everything. Meanwhile, hardware-accelerated processing is both faster and more power efficient, which brings loads of advantages, particularly on laptops running on battery power. 

Since version 1.7.0 is a major release for HandBrake, it brings loads of important improvements and a full list can be found over at GitHub. While improved support for HDR or added support for Apple VideoToolbox are significant enhancements in the newest version of the software, perhaps the most important tweak is the added support for drag and drop of multiple files at once on Apple macOS and Microsoft Windows-based systems. 

When we first heard rumors about Nvidia's plan to add the GeForce RTX 4080 Super graphics card to its fleet, we considered it unlikely. The company feels pretty comfortable from a competition point of view and has not used the 'Super' brand for quite a while. But evidence mounts that the green company is prepping its GeForce RTX 4080 Super graphics board. 

The PCI ID for Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4080 Super graphics card was listed yesterday in a PCI ID repository. Realix, the developer of the popular diagnostic suite HWiNFO, declared the addition of GeForce RTX 4080 Super as an upcoming change for the next version of the program. Typically, diagnostic software developers receive information about forthcoming hardware well in advance, so we can consider this 'listing' as further proof that the RTX 4080 Super is incoming. This is not rock-solid proof, though, so take it with a grain of salt.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4080 Super is allegedly built on Nvidia's AD103 graphics processor, just like the regular version. However, the exact configuration of the GPU remains uncertain. It could operate with all of its 10,240 CUDA cores enabled, maintain the GeForce RTX 4080's 9,728 CUDA cores with increased clock speeds, or possess a different setup. In any case, it promises to be one of the best graphics cards around when it arrives. When it will be released is another question, though it would be logical for Nvidia to release it in time for the holiday season.

Speculating about the specifications of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4080 Super is challenging at this stage. It is anticipated to be positioned above the standard GeForce RTX 4080 but below the top-tier GeForce RTX 4090. So, a minor performance uplift compared to its predecessor would suffice to sell it at a higher price since the gap between RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 is huge. Nvidia might also choose to release the GeForce RTX 4080 Super exclusively to OEMs, catering to PC manufacturers who prefer having new product versions annually to highlight improvements over previous models. 

In any case, Nvidia appears to be in the preparation phase for the product, which might end up a retail model or exclusively available as an add-in-board from selected PC manufacturers. Semi-official sources, while somewhat reliable, should not be considered conclusive as they are unofficial, and companies' plans, including product launches, are subject to change or cancellation.

Nvidia may be prepping mysterious GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card as a well-known PCI ID repository now lists such a product, which suggests that the device has been listed in a driver, Linux patch, GPU-Z validation, or BIOS. The product may end up as an OEM-only add-in-board available from select PC makers, but at least Nvidia seems to be prepping it, which somewhat corroborates the ongoing rumors that GeForce RTX 4080 Super is incoming. This is still a rumor and as such we must take the news with a pinch of salt.

Nvidia recently added 10de:2703 (NVIDIA_DEV.2703), an entry described as GeForce RTX 4080 Super to its R515 test driver, as noticed by StefanG3D from LaptopVideo2Go. The product is said to be based on Nvidia's AD103 graphics processor, though it is unclear whether the GPU comes with all of its 10,240 CUDA cores enabled, retains GeForce RTX 4080's 9,728 CUDA cores yet adopts higher clocks, or has another configuration. 

Now, while semi-official repositories are reliable sources of information, they are not the ultimate truth, not only because they are not official, but because plans can change and companies may cancel certain products because of their launches. The particular listing of the 10de:2703 device designated as GeForce RTX 4080 Super was added by T4CFantacy, who is a TechPowerUp GPU database with access to early GPU BIOS and GPU-Z validations, as noted by VideoCardz. Therefore, it is likely, but not definite that Nvidia and/or its partners are working on products called GeForce RTX 4080 Super. 

At this point it is hard to make guesses about specifications of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4080 Super, though we would imagine that this one would sit above the regular GeForce RTX 4080 but below the GeForce RTX 4090, the best graphics card money can buy. If the unit offers a slight performance upgrade versus its predecessor, it will be good enough to further solidify its position on the market of desktop discrete graphics boards. Meanwhile, the company could make its GeForce RTX 4080 Super an OEM-only product aimed at PC makers who tend to want 'new' SKUs every year to show the difference between contemporary and last year's offerings. Anyhow, for now take the information about Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4080 with a grain of salt. 

In addition to the alleged GeForce RTX 4080 Super, the R515 test driver also lists H100 SXM5 96GB AI and HPC GPU for compute. This part will likely use high-density HBM3 or HBM3E memory and let applications access 96 GB of it, up from 80 GB accessible today.

MSI has quietly introduced its new Ventus Essential series of graphics cards that will complement the company's regular Ventus family of boards (as noticed by @momomo_us). The new Ventus Essential cards will offer almost exactly the same specifications as normal Ventus add-in-boards, but will likely have a different bill-of-materials (BOM), which will make MSI's costs slightly lower.

MSI's Ventus Essential lineup currently consists of the GeForce RTX 4070, GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, and GeForce RTX 4090, which rank among the best graphics cards. All boards have the same clocks and cooling systems as standard Ventus cards, but Ventus Essential features two DisplayPort and two HDMI outputs, whereas regular Ventus boards have three DisplayPort and one HDMI output. Essential obviously points to something basic, but this may not be the case.

"It has slight structural improvements over Ventus but mostly the same design/specs," wrote Hassan Mujtaba of WccfTech. Note that MSI does not officially disclose any differences between its Ventus and Ventus Essential graphics boards, so let us try to speculate a little.

The display outputs are an interesting change. Right now, DisplayPort on RTX 40-series cards remains on the DP1.4a spec, which has a maximum data rate of 25.92 Gbps using 8b/10b encoding. HDMI 2.1 meanwhile offers up to 42 Gbps data rates using 16b/18b encoding. That's 62% more bandwidth, which means HDMI 2.1 can output up to 8K 120 Hz using DSC (Display Stream Compression), while DP1.4a tops out at around 8K 72 Hz using DSC. But HDMI typically costs more for licensing than DisplayPort, which makes this particular change a bit odd.

Besides the video ports, modern graphics cards are highly complex devices that use hundreds of components. Custom graphics cards, such as MSI's Ventus series, tend to slightly change the bill-of-materials over their lifetimes because some components may get cheaper and others may disappear from the market. But it looks like MSI wants to concurrently offer Ventus and Ventus Essential parts, possibly with slightly different bundles and slightly different BOMs.

Such an approach allows MSI to be flexible with its costs and offer its GeForce RTX 40-series products at more competitive prices. Of course, it remains to be seen whether these Ventus Essential boards will be significantly cheaper than non-Essential Ventus cardsbut the key point is that with more SKUs the company will be able to pick the right series and produce it if it finds it more suitable.

Asus has finally officially introduced its flagship graphics card: the ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090. The board comes with the highest out-of-box AD102 GPU clocks, ultimate tweaking ability, a sophisticated voltage regulating module (VRM), an advanced cooling system, and extreme overclockability. Asus has plenty of reasons to suggest this is the world's best graphics card — and it's got a price to match. The ROG Matrix RTX 4090 carries a recommended price tag of $3,199, which is twice Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090 MSRP of $1,599.

The Asus ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 is based on the AD102 GPU with 16,384 CUDA cores that come with a 2700 MHz maximum frequency out-of-box (up from 2520 MHz, recommended by Nvidia). These CUDA cores are mated with 24GB of 21 GT/s GDDR6X memory. The graphics card relies on a custom printed circuit board (PCB) with a 24-phase VRM with high-current power stages and one 12VHPWR connector that can deliver up to 600W of very clean power to the GPU. The PCB has numerous sensors, which allow it to monitor the temperature of the GPU, memory chips, VRM, coils, and even PCB itself. 

The graphics card features an all-in-one cooling system with a custom-engineered cold plate that cools the GPU, memory, and VRM, as well as an embedded pump, 700mm of tubing, and a 360mm radiator. To maximize heat transfer from the graphics processor to the cooler, Asus uses liquid metal thermal interface material (TIM) — an industry first for a GPU. The cooling system also has magnetic, daisy-chainable fans with RGB lighting, which allow for minimal cable clutter.

Premium hardware isn't the only strength of the Asus ROG Matrix RTX 4090. The manufacturer also amplified its GPU Tweak III software with more monitoring and overclocking features that take advantage of the card's extra capabilities and sensors. The program allows the user to set a power target, increase GPU voltage, set the GPU boost clock, adjust the voltage/frequency curve, modify the memory clock, and change the fan speed. Meanwhile, the Thermal Map capability provides real-time temperature readouts across the card, while the new mileage feature tracks the card's usage at different power levels.

An interesting feature is that the card supports Power Detector+, which reads the 12VHPWR connector and measures currents across all power wires to detect any anomalies (advising the user to reseat the cable, if necessary).

"The ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 is an overclocker's dream," says a statement by Asus. "In fact, since this card was unveiled at Computex, it has claimed three World Records and five Global First Place records for a total of seven overclocking records in 3DMark11 Performance, 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme, Unigine Superposition 1080p Xtreme, 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, 3DMark Port Royal, GPUPI v3.3 1B, GPUPI v3.3 32B, and Unigine Superposition 8K Optimized."

Indeed, without any modifications, Asus' ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 broke the 4 GHz GPU clock barrier earlier this year, so the company isn't wrong — this board does appear to be an overclocker's dream. But while it's certainly faster than any other RTX 4090 currently on the market, the ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 also costs twice as much as a regular RTX 4090. It'll probably be hard for many to justify spending an extra $1,600 on the extra performance, even if they're into overclocking.

The Asus ROG Matrix RTX 4090 is, obviously, not for everyone. It's a limited-edition product aimed at die-hard overclockers who are looking to squeeze every last drop of performance out of their hardware. It's for people who actually enjoy tweaking their systems to gain a couple of points on a benchmarking test. Naturally, that also makes it perfect for bragging rights.

Asus is set to launch its flagship ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card next week on September 19, 2023. The graphics board was announced at Computex, but the company only shared that it uses an innovative closed-loop cooling system with a liquid metal thermal interface. Meanwhile, the product has already become a legend as it nearly conquered a 4 GHz GPU frequency, an industry's first.

"The wait is almost over," an Asus tweet reads. "Count down to the official launch of our flagship graphics card – the ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090."

The Asus ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 is one of the most mysterious products introduced recently. We know it carries Nvidia's AD102 graphics processor and 24 GB of GDDR6X memory. However, Asus has been tight-lipped about out-of-box clocks of both the GPU and SGRAM, instead focusing on its custom printed circuit board with a sophisticated voltage regulating module and its cooling system with Liquid Metal thermal interface.

Plenty of clean power and a powerful cooling system are indeed required for successful overclocking. So, all makers of graphics cards tend to use custom PCBs with powerful VRMs and an all-in-one 360-mm liquid cooling system. What sets the ROG Matrix RTX 4090 graphics card apart is its use of a special ingredient: liquid metal thermal interface material (TIM), which enhances heat transfer from the hot components to the cooling system. While Asus doesn't disclose the specific type of liquid metal TIM employed, such materials are typically composed of gallium or gallium alloys known for their exceptional heat conductivity.

However, utilizing liquid metal thermal interfaces presents certain risks and challenges. These TIMs are electrically conductive, potentially leading to short circuits if not handled with care and precision. Moreover, they can be corrosive to specific metals like aluminum. Despite these challenges, Asus asserts its experience with using liquid metal TIMs in laptops for several years, indicating confidence in their application for graphics cards.

In any case, we already know that the Asus ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 can hit nearly 4 GHz GPU with liquid nitrogen, so we'll learn next week what it is capable of when equipped with its stock cooling system and Liquid Metal TIM. Asus clearly wanted to build the best graphics card possible, so we will find out soon enough whether it has succeeded.

AMD's Radeon RX 7800 XT may not be radically better than its predecessor in terms of performance, but it is enough to challenge Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070, which is perhaps why some graphics card manufacturers and retailers are cutting prices of custom GeForce RTX 4070 models by $50 in the U.S.

Currently, Amazon.com, BestBuy, B&H Photo Video, and Newegg have GeForce RTX 4070 graphics cards available for $549 from Asus, Gigabyte, and Zotac. The list includes several models:

• Asus GeForce RTX 4070 Dual at B&H Photo Video.
• Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4070 WindForce OC at Amazon, Best Buy, B&H Photo Video, and Newegg.
• Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Twin Edge OC Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse at Amazon, and Newegg.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 carries an MSRP of $599, but AMD's Radeon RX 7800 XT is priced at $499. Despite being priced lower, AMD's offering sometimes outperforms its more expensive rival in many games that depend on rasterization, with performance that's close to the competitor in some ray tracing-supporting games as well. This certainly increases the value of AMD's product, earning it a spot on our list of the best graphics cards.

We suspect that's why at least three GPU manufacturers are partnering with select retailers to offer certain GeForce RTX 4070 models with a $50 discount. However, it's unknown whether this is a short-term campaign or if other manufacturers and retailers will join it and keep the base price at $549 for the long-term.

Regardless, it doesn't look like Nvidia is quietly reducing the recommended price of its GeForce RTX 4070 graphics cards. The official MSRP remains at $599, just as the RTX 4060 Ti sits at $399 with the 4060 Ti 16GB model at $499. Now that AMD's Navi 32 GPUs have arrived, you can now find all three of those RTX cards for less than their respective MSRPs.

Asus has started to sell some of the best graphics cards under the company's Tianxuan (Heavenly Chosen) portfolio. Marketed under the TX Gaming moniker, the new trio of graphics cards encompasses the GeForce RTX 4070, GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, and GeForce RTX 4060.

The Tianxuan series may be new to some since it's one of Asus' China-exclusive sub-brands. The company has launched many gaming laptops from the Tianxuan series but is extending the product portfolio to graphics cards, specifically the GeForce RTX 40-series parts.

The TX Gaming graphics cards spit images of Asus' Atlas Shark (Megalodon) series. They're using the same cooler but with a different color theme. While the Atlas Shark series cooler stick to a black and grey combination, the TX Gaming series arrives with a white and grey theme with teal accents. There aren't any visible changes to the cooling solution. It's still a thick shroud with three axial, dual-ball bearing cooling fans. The graphics cards also have a reinforced metal backplate that helps with cooling.

Regardless of the model, the TX Gaming graphics card measures 12.48 x 5.35 x 2.13 inches (317 x 136 x 54mm), so we're looking at a triple-slot design. The size of the cooler seems a bit overkill for the lower-tier SKUs, such as the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (160W) or GeForce RTX 4060 (115W). However, it looks like Asus didn't want to waste resources redesigning the cooler for each SKU. Instead, the company used the same cooler for all three graphics cards.

As their part numbers insinuate, the TX Gaming graphics cards feature a factory overclock. However, Asus didn't share this information on its product pages or online store. We only know that the graphics cards require one 8-pin PCIe power connector for external power. Many will be glad that Asus didn't opt for the pesky 16-pin power connector. At any rate, you'd want a power supply with a minimum capacity of 650W for whichever model you pick up. Asus didn't alter the design of the display outputs. Therefore, the TX Gaming graphics cards provide one HDMI 2.1 port and up to three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs.

Asus sells the TX Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 (TX-RTX4070-O12G-Gaming) for $733.54. Meanwhile, the TX Gaming GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (TX-RTX4060TI-O8G-Gaming) and TX Gaming GeForce RTX 4060 (TX-RTX4060-O8G-Gaming) retail for $526.91 and $386.82, respectively.

Here's a mid to high-end desktop gaming PC from MSI that's reduced in price saving you money on the latest hardware. This MSI Aegis RS (model - 13NUE-450US) is now $1,749 - that's a reduction of $249. Contained in this gaming PC is the latest Intel 13th Gen Core i7-13700KF processor, and one of Nvidia's current best GPUs the RTX 4070 with 12GB of VRAM. 

Another RTX 4070 powered computer, albeit the laptop GPU version with 8GB of VRAM, Lenovo's Legion 5i (model - 16IRX8) is on sale for $1,569. Containing one of the best CPUs the Intel Core i9-13900HX, a whopping 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 1TB SSD. These components power the 16-inch display and help to pump the refresh rate up to 240Hz.

At half its original price, this condenser microphone from Razer is an attractive purchase if you're in the market for a new desktop mic. Currently, the Razer Seiren V2 X is available for $49. 

See below for more deals.

TL;DR — Today’s Best Deals

• MSI Aegis RS 13NUE-450US Gaming Desktop: now $1,749 at Newegg (was $1,999)
• Lenovo Legion 5i 16-inch Legion Pro 7 (Model - 16IRX8): now $1,569 at B&H Photo (was $2,069)
• Razer Seiren V2 X USB Condenser Microphone: now $49 at Amazon (was $99)
• TeamGroup 128GB C186 USB 3.2 Flash Drive: now $6 at Newegg (was $10)
• UGREEN Revodok 7 in 1 USB-C Hub: now $27 at Amazon (was $32)

Today’s best deals in detail

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Nvidia's prototype quad-slot cooling system for never-released 40-series graphics card has made quite a splash among enthusiasts in the recent months partly because of an unusual PCB mounting and partly because of its size. But the cooler apparently has an interesting wrinkle: it has a third fan inside to boost its performance even further.

 @Harukaze5719 has found more pictures of the ultimate GeForce RTX 40-series cooling system published by Hayaka, the owner of the cooler who once wanted to sell it for $120,000. This time around, Hayaka disassembled the cooling system and discovered that in addition to two large fans, it has a small fan inside that is meant to generate additional airflow. It also turned out that the prototype cooling system has 22 heat pipes to effectively distribute heat dissipated by the AD102 graphics processor as well as its voltage regulating module.

PCB placement, 22 heat pipes, and three fans indicate that the prototype of the monstrous graphics card was meant to deliver maximum possible performance at maximum possible power. To that end, we are dealing with a prototype cooling system that is meant to deliver overkill performance for simply the best graphics card available.

Meanwhile, an interesting thing about the current prototype is that it only has one 12VHPWR auxiliary PCIe power connector that can deliver up to 600W of power, so a cooler this large might be an overkill for the board. Then again, if Nvidia's plan was to develop the world's highest-performing air cooler for an ultimate graphics card, then this monstrous unit was a way to go.

Yet, it would be interesting to literally hear a cooling system with three fans one of which is located inside the cooler. While Nvidia's cooling systems for Founders Edition graphics cards tend to be rather quiet, it is unlikely that this particular device aimed at the graphics cards sometimes referred to as 'The Beast' was ever meant to be quiet.

Colorful has expanded the company's iGame lineup with two new GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards. The latest additions included the iGame GeForce RTX 4070 Ultra Z OC and iGame GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Mini OC 8GB-V, based on two of the best graphics cards on the market.

The iGame GeForce RTX 4070 Ultra Z OC is an all-white graphics card with pink accents measuring 12.3 x 4.7 x 2 inches (313.5 x 118.8 x 50.5mm). There's some RGB lighting on the side of the triple-fan graphics card, which you can control via Colorful's iGame Center software. The iGame GeForce RTX 4070 Ultra Z OC's most unique feature is the hidden connector at the rear of the PCB and under the backplate. It's not a new concept, as manufacturers like Inno3D have implemented a similar solution on their GeForce RTX 4070 and GeForce RTX 4060 Ti. It's a more user-friendly alternative in contrast to Asus' proprietary proposition.

The iGame GeForce RTX 4070 Ultra Z OC sticks to a conventional 8-pin PCIe power connector rather than the 16-pin (12VHPWR) power connector found on the Ultra W SKUs. Since the GeForce RTx 4070 employs a compact PCB, it has more than enough spacing for Colorful to place the 8-pin power connector on the rear and route the cable through the graphics card's heatsink. The graphics card features a detachable magnetic backplate to access the 8-pin power connector easily. Colorful also bundles a white extension 8-pin power cable with the graphics card for DIYers that want a full-white build.

The iGame GeForce RTX 4070 Ultra Z OC has the same 2,475 MHz boost clock speed as the reference GeForce RTX 4070. Pushing the small overclock button on the rear I/O of the graphics card will push it to 2,505 MHz, less than a 2% overclock. Display options include three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs and one HDMI 2.1 port.

On the other hand, the iGame GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Mini OC 8GB-V is a tiny version of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti. Mind you, it's the vanilla version and not the 16GB variant that recently went on sale. With dimensions of 7.4 x 5.1 x 1.8 inches (188 x 130.55 x 45.8mm), this is as small as a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti can get. It features a white exterior with a touch of RGB lighting on the side of the graphics card.

The graphics card only has a 104mm cooling fan and draws power from an 8-pin PCIe power connector. Given the limited landscape, there's no room to hide the power connector on the iGame GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Mini OC 8GB-V.

Again, the iGame GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Mini OC 8GB-V adheres to Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 Ti specification, meaning it has the same 2,535 MHz boost clock. The overclock button will get the graphics card to 2,580 MHz, a mere 1.7% overclock. Besides the overclock button, the rear I/O houses the three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs and a single HDMI 2.1 port.

The iGame GeForce RTX 4070 Ultra Z OC and iGame GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Mini OC 8GB-V haven't yet arrived in the U.S. market. The former is currently retailing for $710 in China.

Asus' connector-less graphics card concept could soon become a reality. If the initiative takes off, the best graphics cards may not need power cables anymore. Demanding DIYers will surely love the idea since it'll help reduce cable clutter.

One of the most impressive highlights at the Asus booth at Computex 2023 was a prototype GeForce RTX 4070 without external power connectors. The graphics card didn't have the conventional 8-pin PCIe connector or the novelty 16-pin power connector, which has already gone through a quick revision for improved safety. Nonetheless, the graphics card doesn't magically draw power out of thin air, but a proprietary connection, which is one downside to Asus' design.

Instead of PCIe power connectors, Asus implemented a custom connector called the "GC_HPWR" connector that takes after a PCIe x1 connector. The GC_HPWR connector resides beside the PCIe 4.0 x16 connector. The custom slot is essentially a passthrough solution. As opposed to the 16-pin power cable connecting to the graphics card, it plugs into a connector on the back of the motherboard where the power passes through the slot to the graphics card. As a result, the graphics card will not function on a typical motherboard. It requires a proprietary expansion slot on upcoming Asus motherboards with the BTF (Back To Future) design, where the power connectors are behind the motherboard.

Bilibili content creator Eixa Studio, who recently attended Bilibili World 2023 exhibition in Shanghai, China, claims that Asus will start mass production of the connector-less graphics card in the Fall so that retail products may hit the market before the end of the year. While we've already seen the GeForce RTX 4070 Megalodon and TUF Gaming Z790 BTF with a black theme, Eixa Studio saw a new white variant of the same GeForce RTX 40-series graphics card and an upcoming TX Gaming B760-BTF WiFi motherboard for Intel Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh processors.

Due to the design and extra components required, the connector-less graphics cards and matching BTF motherboards will likely come with a slight premium compared to standard hardware. The million-dollar question is whether the higher price tag can convince consumers to jump on Asus' bandwagon. The cable-free design offers no performance benefits other than making your build look cleaner and avoiding the 16-pin power connector meltdown disaster.

MSI has seemingly started to sell its own GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card with a two-wide blower-type cooling system. Since Nvidia does not produce its own high-end graphics cards with blowers since they may compete against its expensive workstation and server-oriented add-in-boards (AIBs), large makers of graphics cards tend to not offer them. According to a tweet by @harukaze5719, MSI has apparently produced one and it is being offered for sale

MSI's GeForce RTX 4090 Aero S 24G (which is not even listed at MSI.com) is now apparently available from 3DStor.com, an online store specializing on datacenter and workstation hardware. From a specifications point of view, the board follows Nvidia's recommendations when it comes to boost clocks (2520 MHz), so this graphics card is certainly not a factory-overclocked product. In fact, keeping in mind that the device is aimed not only at gamers with compact rigs, but mostly at professionals seeking to install two or more of such cards in one system, it is better to run at stock to avoid overheating. 

The board uses a 16-pin 12VHPWR connector, but for some reason 3DStor.com lists its TGP at 350W, which is 100W lower when compared to regular RTX 4090 AIBs. We must assume that this is a typo and that its TGP is the same as other RTX 4090 graphics cards, which are currently the best graphics cards for gaming. Meanwhile, when the board peaks at 450W, its blower-based cooling system likely gets extremely loud. 

Speaking of blower-style coolers in general, we must note that while not the most silent or efficient, these cooling systems are ideal for cooling high-heat graphics cards in compact PCs, especially when multiple cards are installed. They work well even with limited internal airflow and the only viable alternative in such cases is obviously liquid cooling. 

While 3DStor lists MSI's GeForce RTX 4090 Aero S 24G, it never reveals its price. In fact, it is likely that interested parties need to contact the company and tell the number of boards they want before getting exact quote. Meanwhile, the device can be purchased at Ebay for a whopping price of $3,065, which is comparable to the price of mid-range professional offerings.

It's of course, cheaper to build your own PC if you can source the parts for a good price and have the knowledge and confidence to assemble it on your own. But for those that want to remove any self-assembly hassle and buy or gift a pre-built system, then this deal on the Skytech Azure Gaming PC with RTX 4070 Ti for $1,649 might be of interest. See below for a full list of components in this speedy gaming PC. 

Another bargain is the ASRock Radeon RX 6600 GPU sees it now on offer for $174 at Newegg. This is a good GPU for some 1080p gaming and building a small gaming rig on a tight budget. With AMD partnering with Bethesda for their Starfield game you can grab a free copy of Starfield: Standard Edition with selected AMD cards taking part in the promotional campaign - saving you $60 if this a game you're looking forward to and were thinking of purchasing. 

And to round out our deals, here is one of the best price-for-performance GPUs available. Pick up the ASRock Radeon RX 6700 XT for $309 at Newegg. Don't forget to use code VGAEXCAA799 when you checkout. This is the lowest price available for an RX 6700 XT GPU currently on the market.

See below for more of today's deals. 

TL;DR — Today’s Best Deals

• Skytech Azure Gaming PC (RTX 4070 Ti): now $1,649 at Newegg (was $2,099)
• ASRock Radeon RX 6600: now $174 at Newegg (was $239)
• ASRock Radeon RX 6700 XT: now $309 at Newegg with promo code (was $239)
• Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 3070 Ti: now $419 at Newegg (was $479)
• PlayStation 5 Console: now $499 at Newegg (was $559)

Today’s best deals in detail

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According to a recent Reddit post, Nvidia is subtly upgrading its Best GPU the RTX 4090 Founders Edition, with the same modified 16-pin power connector recently found on the RTX 4070. The Redditor, known as u/prackprackprack, uploaded pictures to Reddit showing off the shortened sense pins on his RTX 4090. The changes were confirmed by other Redditors, comparing his images to images of older RTX 4090 FE cards.

The modifications made on the new RTX 4090 FE power connector include changes to the four sense pins that feed data to and from the GPU to the PSU. The pins have been retracted slightly inside the connector. This adjustment was apparently taken from the latest 12V-2x6 power connector specifications to ensure the power connector won't continuously feed power to the GPU if the 16-pin power cable is not inserted all the way. This should keep the graphics card safe from death due to fire or overheating, as we've seen with various RTX 4090 cards since launch.

Brand New 4090 FE Shortened Sense Pins? In response to Igor’s Lab Article “Secret change to the sense pins starting from the GeForce RTX 4070 FE and no one noticed it” from r/nvidia

It's good to see that Nvidia is finally introducing this modified connector to the RTX 4090, which is the most prone to disaster due to its incredibly high power consumption of up to 450W — more on some overclocked models. The modifications made to the RTX 4090 were originally seen in the RTX 4070, which has had them since launch even though Nvidia didn't call out this fact.

For reference, the power connector we're seeing here (for both the 4090 and 4070) appears to be a prototype 12V-2x6 connector that has been built according to PCI-SIG's recommended specifications. The 12V-2x6 connector is still in active development, meaning a finalized version of the connector is not yet available for Nvidia to use. Nonetheless, it seems like the RTX 4090 melting reports were enough for Nvidia to rush a prototype version out to its newer cards, hopefully stopping more GPUs from dying.

The frustrating part of this situation is that we don't know which production versions of the RTX 4090 are receiving this new connector. We also don't know if the prototype connector is making its way to AIB partner models or not. But, if Nvidia follows the same trend as the RTX 4070, the RTX 4090 should be getting this new connector for both Founders Edition and AIB partner models.

We'd also expect all manufacturers of other graphics cards that use a 16-pin connector — including the RTX 4080, RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4060 Ti, and perhaps even some RTX 4060 models — to eventually shift to the new style connector as well. How long it might take before the older variants clear the market remains to be seen.

According to Andreas Schilling, an editor at Germany's HardwareLuxx, Nvidia add-in-board partners are largely disinterested in preparing and promoting GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB graphics cards. This could mean fewer choices than expected for those interested in this $499 price point targeting GPU.

The German tech magazine editor Tweeted (h/t VideoCardz) that he had discussed the upcoming launch of the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB model with some AIBs. In particular, he raised his concerns by mentioning "how many fewer models there are compared to the standard variant." Reading between the lines, AIBs may only be going through the motions with this launch, and that will ultimately mean fewer models, perhaps even resulting in some market scarcity.

Market scarcity could be a bad thing for consumers, as it usually stymies price competition. However, in this case, the mix of performance, features, memory, and the $499 target price might mean no one will be interested in this product anyway. A major issue for this upcoming GeForce RTX 40 family member is that the $499 price point is getting perilously close to the gravitational pull of the RTX 4070 zone.

The $499 MSRP of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB is way higher than a typical Nvidia 60-class product. Meanwhile, the RTX 4070 adds a significant performance boost for approximately $100 more, with its 5,888 CUDA cores (i.e. over 35% more CUDA cores). Another big advantage of the RTX 4070 stems from its memory subsystem: using faster GDDR6, and a wider memory bus, for almost double the memory bandwidth.

Our Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti review made the RTX 4070 12GB's superiority very clear, and some extra bandwidth-constrained memory isn't going to help the former very much.

From a leak we reported yesterday, it probably won't be too long until the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB is released. A reliable Twitter tipster shared an image that indicates the 16GB version of the RTX 4060 Ti is going to be on shelves from July 18, and we typically see reviews a day before.

Referencing back to Andreas Schilling's Tweets, the HardwareLuxx editor asserts that the only reason for the existence of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB SKU is "to quiet those critics who find that 8GB are not enough." So, please stay tuned for our review of one of these questionable graphics cards, and we will be sure to let you know whether this memory-bumped GPU is worthwhile and whether it is worthy of inclusion in the ranks of the best graphics cards.

Renowned overclocker Allen 'Splave' Golibersuch has succeeded in overclocking the Asus ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 to a world record 4,005 MHz. This is the first time (although there will now be a flurry of attempts) for a GPU to hit 4 GHz. It comes on the back of a previous attempt which saw the card fall just short (3,945 MHz) of the magic number.

The new world record was set on an Asus ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card (which may become the best graphics board money can buy when it is released), which features a cherry-picked GPU that is powered by a sophisticated voltage regulating module (VRM) that delivers up to 600W of very clean power (the maximum one can get from one 12VHPWR connector) to the processor. The GPU was cooled down using liquid nitrogen, which is common for extreme overclocking.

The Nvidia AD102 GPU on the graphics card managed to pass the GPUPi 32B 3.3 test at 4,005 MHz and then the GPUPi 1B 3.3 test a 4,020 MHz. GPUPi is certainly not a graphics program, it uses CUDA cores to calculate the value of Pi number to 32 billion and two 1 billion decimal places. Essentially, the workload does not need to overclock fixed function graphics hardware like texture units or render back ends. Nonetheless, 4 GHz on a GPU is quite an achievement.

Last week Splave managed to boost the AD102 graphics processor on the Asus ROG Matrix RTX 4090 to a record-breaking 3,945 MHz. Rather than modifying the card, he simply substituted the original all-in-one liquid cooling system with a Kingpin Cooling TEK-9 Icon Extreme GPU pot designed for LN2, and incorporated three heaters along with three ElmorLabs HOT300 heater controllers. All further adjustments and overclocking were carried out using BIOS configurations and overclocking software.

Nvidia's AD102 was architected to for high clocks. The GPU developer relaxed transistor density, which possibly points to usage of high-performance libraries, so the graphics processor was destined to be fast. Meanwhile, clocking 76.3 billion transistors at 4 GHz is something that is quite unexpected.

PCI-SIG is yet to formally introduce a revamped version of 12VHPWR connector that can solve the melting connector issue that has plagued GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards several months ago. Igor's Lab claims that Nvidia's own GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition graphics board already uses the refined 12V-2×6 auxiliary power plug.

The main difference between the original 12VHPWR connector and the new 12V-2×6 plug are shorter sense pins, approximately 1.7 mm. This design ensures that the power header is fully inserted into the connector, otherwise the power supply does not activate high power modes, avoiding overheating and melting when a graphics card requires a lot of power.

It looks like for now only Astron produces the new 12V-2×6 power connectors and Nvidia is the only company that uses them, at least according to Igor's Lab. Other suppliers of graphics cards will most likely wait for PCI-SIG to formally specify the new plug before using it for mass market products. It seems that Nvidia is willing to take the risk with its GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition product, which is one of the best graphics cards around. 

What remains to be seen is when PCI-SIG finalizes the new 12V-2×6 power connector and when makers of graphics cards start using it instead of the notorious 12VHPWR plug.

Renowned overclocker Allen 'Splave' Golibersuch has managed to overclock Nvidia's AD102 GPU on Asus's upcoming ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card to nearly 4.0 GHz — 3,945 MHz to be more exact — without modifying the card. With liquid nitrogen cooling, the board could pass the GPUPi 32B 3.3 test and even set the world's record in this benchmark.  

By using liquid nitrogen cooler on the ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 card (which has all chances to lead the best graphics cards list) that has been architected for overclocking, Splave managed to push the AD102 graphics processor to an unprecedented 3,945 MHz. He did not modify the card, just replaced the stock all-on-one liquid cooling system with the Kingpin Cooling TEK-9 Icon Extreme GPU pot for LN2 and attached three heaters and three ElmorLabs HOT300 heater controllers. All the tweaking and overclocking were then performed using BIOS settings and OC software. 

The GPU running at 3,945 MHz calculated Pi to 32,000,000,000 digits in 46.077 seconds, which is a world record, according to Splave. GPUPi is certainly not a graphics workload, so it remains to be seen how high the ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 can push the GPU in actual games, but getting very close to the 4.0 GHz GPU clock milestone is important. To date, 3,825 MHz is AD102's record for 3D workloads. 

This is not the first time Nvidia's AD102 GPU has been overclocked significantly higher than its recommended 2,520 MHz boost clock, without voltmodding the card itself. Perhaps the Asus ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card is a device that does not need voltmodding? It uses a highly-custom printed circuit board (PCB) with a meticulously designed voltage regulating module (VRM) that can deliver up to 600W of very clean power (the maximum one can get from one 12VHPWR connector) to the GPU and memory, which is vital for a successful overclock. 

Asus itself positions the ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 as a crème-de-la-crème graphics card with the industry's highest GPU boost clock for those who want absolutely the best PC hardware and have pockets that are deep enough to afford it. Apparently, the graphics board can impress even before it hits the market.

PNY has quietly introduced its GeForce RTX 4070 Blower graphics card that, as the name suggests, uses a blower type cooling system. The board is currently available only in China, but it can be shipped to any part of the world and may eventually show up in the U.S. and/or Europe. 

PNY's GeForce RTX 4070 Blower, which was discovered by MEGAsizeGPU at JD.com, sports typical specifications for a GeForce RTX 4070 board: the AD104 graphics processor with 5,888 CUDA cores that operates at 1,920 MHz – 2,475 MHz and is connected to 12GB of GDDR6X memory using a 192-bit interface. The card has four display outputs (three DisplayPorts 1.4, one HDMI 2.0b) and one eight-pin auxiliary PCIe power connector.

The key selling point of the graphics card is not its enhanced performance, but its dimensions — it measures 278.4 mm x 119.4 mm  x 40 mm — that are compact enough to install more than one card into a motherboard thanks to the blower cooler.

Blower type coolers are not always the quietest or the most efficient cooling systems. However, when it comes to cooling down a graphics card that emits 200 ~ 300W of heat in a compact PC, these coolers are often as good as it gets. Blowers exhaust warm air from the case, efficiently operating even when internal air circulation is not ideal. Moreover, in cases where multiple graphics cards are combined in one system, these coolers are the only air solution that can ensure sufficient cooling in such confined spaces with limited air circulation. The only better option would be liquid cooling.

Nvidia doesn't often allow add-in-board partners to use blowers on consumer-oriented products. It's possible that this is because it allows multiple cards to be installed and more easily, and that that kind of horsepower that would rival that of professional graphics cards. Nvidia's RTX-branded professional cards are all equipped with blowers. 

But PNY's GeForce RTX 4070 blower is not cheap. The company officially calls the product 'artificial intelligence turbo graphics card' with a 'silent turbine fan suitable for multi-card environments' and positions it rather for AI developers than for gamers. To that end, the board is priced at ¥6,999 ($966 with taxes, $855 without taxes), which exceeds recommended price of a GeForce RTX 4070 in the U.S. ($599).

Nvidia has published official benchmark results of its upcoming GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card just a week ahead of its launch on June 29. The new $299 Ada Lovelace-based graphics card is shown to be across-the-board faster than its predecessor based on the Ampere architecture, but there is catch: the newcomer shows its most significant advantages with AI frame generation enabled. Without it, it is merely 20% faster, according to Nvidia.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card is based on the AD106 GPU with 3072 CUDA cores enabled that has peak FP32 compute throughput of 15 TFLOPS, which is just 15% higher compared to GeForce RTX 3060 with its 13 FP32 TFLOPS. But the AD106 has noticeable advantages over GA106 in the form of massively improved ray tracing performance (+40%) and Tensor compute throughput (+137%). The latter can be used for AI, advanced DLSS 3 upscaling, and AI image generation workloads. We'll see if that's enough to make it one of the best graphics cards.

We can make guesses why Nvidia decided to balance its Ada Lovelace microarchitecture the way it balanced it, but it is obvious that the company will use benefits — DLSS 3 and AI image generation — that is has to outshine predecessors and competitors in games.

That said, it is not particularly surprising that Nvidia demonstrated its GeForce RTX 4060 with DLSS 3 and image generation enabled in as many games as possible, showing rather dramatic performance gains compared to its GeForce RTX 3060. This is indeed a major improvement of the new GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card as it can enable high framerates with all the eye candy enabled in the latest games, something the GeForce RTX 3060 just cannot do.

The company admits that far not all games support AI frame generation and this is where its GeForce RTX 4060 is only 20% faster than its predecessor. A 20% improvement is still not bad, only it is just not something one would expect from a new generation product based on the all-new architecture. 

Nvidia considers lower power consumption of its GeForce RTX 4060 as another advantage of its new board as it will allow to save some money. Yet, this advantage is less obvious than performance gains.

Leading graphics cards manufacturers like Asus, Colorful, Gainward, Galax, Gigabyte, Inno3D, KFA2, MSI, Palit, PNY, and Zotac will be releasing the GeForce RTX 4060 graphics cards starting June 29. Nvidia's recommended price for GeForce RTX 4060 boards is $299, but expect products that will carry different price tags as well.

Razer often bucks the trends set by some of the best gaming laptops. As bigger has often been considered better in this space, Razer has  stuck with the 14-inch display for the Blade 14 to focus on portability. However, this smaller form factor still incorporates a potent AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS “Phoenix” processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPU.

All this power resides inside a chassis that weighs just a smidge over 4 pounds. Playing up its gaming roots, the 16:10 aspect ratio QHD+ (2560 x 1600) display maxes out at 240 Hz, and there’s RGB lighting for the keyboard and the Razer logo on the lid. Throw in a massive touchpad, plentiful ports, and great battery life and you have what looks to be a winning combination for a highly portable gaming laptop.

However, a laptop can’t be everything to everybody, so some sacrifices had to be made. The Blade 14 has a few cracks in its armor, namely surrounding fan noise and price, but its performance ranks among the best in this gathered field of laptops.

Razer Blade 14 Specs

Design of the Razer Blade 14

The design of the Razer Blade 14 hasn’t changed much over the years. It’d be easy to mistake this year’s model for the one we reviewed back in 2021 regarding its exterior. The compact laptop exudes quality with tight tolerances around the chassis and zero flex.

The display hinge is particularly noteworthy for its strength, with zero “wobble.” With many laptops, the display will wobble back and forth if you move it around or type at a furious pace. With the Blade 14, the hinge is so stiff that it doesn’t move at all once you’ve adjusted the angle to your liking. That sense of quality and solidity extends to tasks as simple as opening the lid. Some laptops are so lightweight or ill-balanced that lifting the lid while the computer is sitting on a desk causes the chassis to lift slightly or requires two hands. With the Blade 14, lifting the lid requires just your thumb, and the chassis remains planted.

The design of the keyboard deck is reminiscent of Apple’s 14-inch MacBook Pro, complete with the tiny, precision perforations for the speakers. On the right side of the Blade 14, you’ll find one USB 3.2 (Type-A), one USB 4 (Type-C) and an HDMI 2.1 port. The left side is home to one USB 3.2 (Type-A), one USB 4 (Type-C), a 3.5 mm headphone jack and a proprietary connector for power.

The Blade 14 measures 12.23 x 8.97 0.70 inches and weighs just 4.05 pounds. That’s ever so slightly larger and heavier than the last Blade 14 we tested in 2021. The other laptops in this field that we've tested witih similar gaming performance (Gigabyte Aorus 15X, Asus ROG Strix G16 and Razer Blade 16) all feature 15.6- or 16-inch displays and are a pound or more heavier than the Blade 14.

Gaming Performance on the Razer Blade 14

The Razer Blade 14 uses an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS processor, which comes in an 8-core/16-thread configuration. The base clock is 4.0 GHz, while the maximum boost clock is 5.2G Hz. Coming alongside the CPU is an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPU (1,410 MHz boost clock, 8GB GDDR6, 100W TDP) and 16GB of DDR5-5600 memory (2 x 8GB).

I played Cyberpunk 2077 on high settings with ray tracing enabled, DLSS Balanced, and DLSS frame generation enabled, averaging 70 frame per second at 1600p. When I dropped the resolution to 1080p with the same graphical settings, performance increased to around 110 fps. I averaged about 130 fps DLSS Quality without ray tracing at 1080p and 90 fps at 1600p. 

The Blade 14 gave us at least 70 fps across the board at 1080p, although stepping up to 1600p resulted in a significant (but expected) drop in performance. We should note that given the wide disparities in resolutions between all four laptops, we’ll note our observations on 1080p performance for all systems. However, 1600p/1440p comments will be limited to the Blade 14 and Gigabyte Aorus 15X.

In our Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Highest Settings) benchmark running at 1080p, the Blade 14 took second place in the rankings at 114 fps behind the Aorus ROG Strix G16 (Core i9-13980HX, RTX 4070, 1200p) at 116 fps. The Blade 16 (Core i9-13950HX, RTX 4070, 2400p) and Gigabyte Aorus 15X (Core i9-13900HX, RTX 4070, 1440p) weren’t far behind at 113 fps and 110 fps, respectively. Bumping the resolution to 1600p saw the Blade 14 fall to 67 fps, putting it on nearly even footing with the Aorus 15X (70 fps) running at 1440p.

Moving on to Grand Theft Auto V (Very High Settings), the ROG Strix G16 secured first place at 1080p with 100 fps, nudging past the ROG Strix G16 and Razer Blade 15 at 95 fps. The Aorus 15X pulled in last with a still respectable 93 fps. Switching to 1600p resolution, the Blade 14 witnessed a 45 percent drop in performance to 55 ps. As with the Shadow benchmark, the Aorus 15X running at 1440p was in the same ballpark at 56 fps.

Switching gears to Far Cry 6 (Ultra Settings), the Blade 14 faltered a little at 1080p compared to its peers. The Blade 14 took top honors this time around at 102 fps and was followed by the ROG Strix G16 at 98 fps. The Blade 14 settled for third place at 85 fps, while the Aorus 15X limped across the finish line at 75 fps. At 1600p resolution, the Blade 14 stepped down to 68 fps, mirroring the Aorus 15X’s 67 fps at 1440p.

Red Dead Redemption 2 (Medium Settings) saw the laptops closely clustered around the 70 fps mark at 1080p resolution. The Blade 14 hit 74 fps and was followed by the Blade 14 at 73 fps, the ROG Strix G16 at 72 fps and the Aorus 15X at 70 fps. When we set the Blade 14’s resolution to 1600p, performance dropped to 45 fps, equaling the Aorus 15X’s performance at 1440p.

As for Borderlands 3 (Badass Settings), this was another instance where the laptops were grouped closely together at 1080p resolution. The Blade 16 hit 102 fps and was followed by the ROG Strix G16 at 100 fps. The Blade 14 and Aorus 15X tied at 98 fps. Increasing the resolution saw the Blade 14 fall to 64 fps, while the Aorus 15X squeezed in a few more frames to 67 fps at 1440p.

We ran the Metro Exodus benchmark (RTX) through 15 loops at 1600p resolution to round out our benchmarks. The benchmark ran at an average 61.44 fps (consistently ranging between 61.27 to 61.55 fps). During the run, the Ryzen 9 7940HS averaged 3.863GHz at 81.4 degrees Celsius (178.52 degrees Fahrenheit). The GeForce RTX 4070 GPU ran at an average of 2.06 GHz and measured 76 C (168.8 F).

Productivity Performance on the Razer Blade 14

The Blade 14 features a Ryzen 9 7940HS processor, 16GB DDR5-5600 memory and 1TB SSD.

In our Geekbench 5 benchmark, the Blade 14 was last for single-core performance. It lost out by a single point to the Aorus 15X (which is effectively in the margin of error). However, the Blade 14 took a severe walloping in the multi-core benchmark, where it mustered a score of 11,121, which was no match for the Raptor Lake competition. The third-place Aorus 15X scored 18,129, while the Blade 16 bested all challengers at 20,497.

The file transfer test also saw the Blade 14 come in last place by a small margin, hitting 1,230.04 MBps while transferring 25GB of files. The Blade 16 once again came in first place at 1,850.71 MBps.

In our Handbrake transcoding test, the Blade 14 slipped into second place, finishing in four minutes and 45 seconds compared to four minutes and eight seconds for the first-place Aorus 15X. The ROG Strix G16 and Blade 16 finished the test in just over five minutes.

Display on the Razer Blade 14

The Blade 14 is no slouch in the display department, as expected, with an as-tested price of $2,699. The 14-inch IPS display has a QHD+ (2560 x 1600) resolution with a maximum refresh rate of 240 Hz. AMD FreeSync Premium is supported via the Radeon 780M GPU integrated into the CPU.

Although the display is a bit on the smaller side for a gaming laptop (15.6 inches is the most popular size, and many are moving to 16 inches), I found the 1600p resolution made the text look super sharp on the display. Coupled with the matte, anti-glare coating, the display was easily readable indoors and outdoors.

Our light meter showed that the Blade 14’s display could get incredibly bright, hitting a maximum of 465 nits. This was second only to its Blade 16 sibling in this grouping, which achieved 511 nits. The superlatives didn’t end there, though; the Blade 14 covered 114.3 percent of the DCI-P3 color space and 161 percent of sRGB. The Blade 16 was the next-closest competitor, but its colorimeter results fell well short of its smaller sibling at 93.7 and 132 percent, respectively.

In real-world testing, the display looked fantastic when playing Cyberpunk 2077. I like to play with all the goodies enabled, and with details cranked to Ultra with ray tracing enabled, the richness of the gaming environment came to life. From the soft, neon glow of the lights and signs in bars to the reflections seen on vehicles passing by in the daytime and at night, Night City can truly shine on this display.

It was a similar experience with Avatar: Way of Water, which I watched on Disney Plus. The expansive aquatic backdrops' vibrant greens and cooling blues were a sight to behold. As someone who was blown away by the original Avatar when seeing it on the big screen when it debuted over a decade ago, seeing Way of Water showed just how far CGI has advanced during that time. Even on the smaller screen of the Blade 14, Pandora looked lush and teeming with life.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the Razer Blade 14

The keyboard feels great under my fingers, with a nice spring-back after pressing a key (Razer says there’s 1 mm of key travel). There’s minimal noise when typing furiously on the keyboard, although the spacebar definitely makes itself audibly known.  

The 14-inch chassis leaves less room for an expansive keyboard, although I had no trouble adjusting to its size. Of course, there’s no room for a number pad off the right side of the keyboard, although folks looking for laptops in this size class likely aren’t expecting one anyway. Razer could have gotten away with including a larger keyboard by repositioning the speakers, which take up a significant amount of space.

The Microsoft Precision touchpad is made of clickable glass, and takes up roughly half of the available palm rest space below the keyboard (it measures 5.9 x 3.4 inches).

Razer's Synapse software is installed to give you complete control over the keyboard. Not only can you reprogram most individual keys, but you also have per-key control over RGB lighting. You can choose your own custom lighting scheme, or choose from several preset options. I personally settled on “Breathing” as my favorite RGB scheme.

I use keyhero.com to test my typing speed with various keyboards. With the Blade 14, I achieved 90 words per minute with 94 percent accuracy. For comparison, I hit 85 wpm with 94 percent accuracy on the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i (Gen 8). 

Audio on the Razer Blade 14 

The Blade 14 features stereo speakers, which are adequate in games and other multimedia content. You can manually tweak the audio settings using the THX Spatial Audio app, but there are also EQ presets for Music, Games, Cinema, and Video. You can also use the app to turn on THX Spatial Audio, which provides a virtual surround sound experience.

I tried THX Spatial Audio in Borderlands 3, Cyberpunk 2077 and Overwatch 2. However, I didn’t notice enough difference between on and off for it to matter much; I just decided to leave it off after my initial tests. The speakers got plenty loud and were powerful enough to mostly drown out the fan noise.

There isn’t a lot of bass from the speakers, and they still sound a bit tinny (which was also one of our complaints with the 2021 version of the Blade 14). Explosions fell flat in Overwatch 2 and bass-heavy tracks like Tupac and Dr. Dre’s “California Love” sounded like they were recorded in a dilapidated bathroom. However, they are serviceable for games, music and movies. But we’d suggest looking at some of the best gaming headsets if you want the best sound experience. 

Upgradeability on the Razer Blade 14

The Blade 14’s internals are accessible after removing eight Torx screws from the bottom panel. With the screws removed, you slide the panel forward to release it from the rear hinge area, and it pops off. 

Once removed, you have direct access to the battery, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth combo card and the SSD. The two SO-DIMM slots (both occupied with 8GB DDR5-5600 modules on our review unit) are “hidden” behind an easily-removed plastic shield. This is a big upgrade over previous Blade 14 models, which had their memory soldered onto the motherboard. 

Battery Life on the Razer Blade 14

When it comes to endurance, the Blade 14 is a strong contender. The laptop lasted eight hours and 34 minutes on a charge during our battery life test consisting of web browsing, light graphics work and video streaming while connected to Wi-Fi with display brightness set at 150 nits. This was just slightly behind the ROG Strix G16, which lasted 15 minutes longer. 

The Aorus 15X and Blade 16 weren’t in contention, as they lasted just 5:20 and 5:06, respectively. 

Heat on the Razer Blade 14

Razer packs in a Ryzen 9 7940HS and RTX 4070 into a very compact chassis. That means the dual-fan cooling system has its work cut out to keep system temperatures in check. When running any game, the fans spin up to maximum RPM, which is very loud to my ears. Wearing noise-canceling headphones was the only way to escape the constant drone of the fans in the background.

We measured 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) on the touchpad and 42.22 degrees C (108 degrees F) between the G and H keys during the Metro Exodus stress test. The hottest spot on the underside of the chassis was 50.83 degrees C (123.5 degrees F). 

Webcam on the Razer Blade 14 

Like most new laptops that are hitting the market these days, Razer outfitted the Blade 14 with a 1080p webcam. Razer includes a handy, physical privacy shutter to block unwanted eyes from spying on you. And to make it completely obvious that the shutter is enabled, a little painted red circle is visible when the lens is covered.

While the image quality is a step up from the old 720p unit we reviewed in the 2021 Blade 14, it’s not quite a match for the best 1080p webcams we reviewed in recent notebooks. Images still look a tad grainy despite the sensor upgrade, and the colors look a bit “off” to my eyes. For example, my salmon-colored shirt appeared more like a pale pink.

The webcam is fine for Google Meet or Zoom meetings, but we’d suggest trying out one of the best webcams if you want better quality.

Software and Warranty on the Razer Blade 14 

Razer keeps the number of factory-installed apps to a minimum with the Blade 14. Razer Synapse is included for access lighting for the keyboard and logo on the lid as well as customizing macros. Some people find Synapse objectionable, especially when it comes to adding new peripherals to a system, but it worked without issue on our review unit. I use a Razer Atheris wireless mouse when testing laptops, and Synapse greeted the mouse with open arms when I first plugged in its USB dongle.

The only other notable additions are the Realtek Audio Console and THX Spatial Audio for fine-tuning the equalizer and overall sound output.

Given that the Blade 14 comes with Windows 11 Home installed, you’ll also have to contend with the plethora of shortcuts that come with the operating system, including Spotify, ESPN and TikTok (among others).

The Blade 14 comes with a 1-year limited warranty for the laptop and a 2-year warranty for the battery.

Razer Blade 14 Configurations 

The Razer Blade 14 comes in three primary configurations. The base Blade 14 SKU with a Ryzen 9 7940HS processor, 16GB of DDR5-5600 memory and an RTX 4060 costs $2,399. Upgrading to the RTX 4070 takes the price to $2,699 – this is the configuration of our review unit. Finally, the flagship SKU with the RTX 4070 and 32GB of DDR5-5600 costs $2,799.

The Blade 14 is currently available to purchase directly from Razer’s website.

Bottom Line

The Razer Blade 14 represents a nice year-over-year bump compared to its predecessor. The switch from a 165Hz QHD to 240Hz QHD+ panel brings a noticeable increase in refresh rate and extra vertical real estate for productivity apps.

We should also note that while previous Blade 14 laptops didn’t allow you to upgrade the memory, the new model is expandable to 64GB of DDR5-5600 via two SO-DIMM slots. Gaming performance was strong across the board, and it was within a few percentage points of the top performers in nearly every game benchmark. Productivity performance came up a bit short in Geekbench and the file transfer test, but it offered solid numbers in our Handbrake encoding test. We also must commend Razer on the display, which not only received a bump in resolution but offers superior brightness and color performance compared to its predecessor.

However, the Blade 14 has two major points against it, one of which can be mitigated. The fans are obnoxiously loud and distracting while gaming, but you can throw on a pair of headphones to alleviate this. One thing that you can’t change, though, is the price. The Blade 14, as tested, costs $2,699. That’s a lot of money to spend for a gaming laptop, especially one that “only” has 16GB of memory and an RTX 4070. The fact that Razer was able to cram this hardware into a device this small accounts for that price premium, but if you’re willing to sacrifice an extra pound of weight, you can get a lot more bang for your buck. For example, the Gigabyte Aorus 15X largely matches the Blade 14 in performance and costs $2,099.  We saw the same kind of extreme price difference among competitors with the Razer Blade 16.

But if excellent performance in the most compact frame is your ultimate goal and you demand AMD's latest processors, there isn’t much else out there like the Razer Blade 14. You just have to be willing to pay up for the privilege.

Last December, AMD launched the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT. At the time, we noted that the price gap was far too narrow to warrant getting the "lesser" card. Since then, online prices have dropped over $100, with the Sapphire RX 7900 XT Pulse we're looking at today being one of the prime options. The RX 7900 XT ranks as one of the best graphics cards, and Sapphire looks to improve on the reference card with a larger form factor and better cooling... or at least quieter cooling.

All of the core specs remain unchanged, so you get the same AMD RDNA 3 GPU architecture, with a healthy 20GB of GDDR6 20Gbps memory. That's 67% more VRAM than Nvidia's similarly priced RTX 4070 Ti. Performance, as you might expect, remains largely unchanged. That's true of most third-party graphics cards, since at most you typically get a 3–5 percent factory overclock. In the case of the RX 7900 XT Pulse, it's a 2.1% factory overclock, with a 5.1% increase in TBP (total board power).

Here's the quick overview of the specs table for the Sapphire card along with some competing GPUs.

We already noted the only differences in core specs between the Sapphire RX 7900 XT Pulse and the reference 7900 XT: GPU boost clock and TBP/TGP. Those are the paper specs, however, and there are other differences in terms of card design, aesthetics, and other aspects.

Right now, Sapphire is one of the three least expensive RX 7900 XT cards available, the others being the XFX RX 7900 XT that uses AMD's reference design — an MBA or "Made By AMD" card — and the ASRock RX 7900 XT Phantom Gaming OC. They all cost $779.99, though Sapphire and ASRock cards require an instant rebate at Newegg to get there.

Several other 7900 XT models are available for around $800, while the most expensive options right now can cost as much as an RX 7900 XTX (around $950). Unless you really love the aesthetic of one of those premium cards, we'd recommend stepping up to the faster AMD XTX GPU rather than paying $200 extra, but that's ultimately an individual choice.

Looking at the primary competition, the Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti only comes with 12GB of VRAM, but it also has a lower TGP and gives you the typical Nvidia extras: DLSS, Frame Generation, tensor cores, and improved ray tracing hardware. We'll get to the performance results shortly, but in our current test suite, it's the usual story: Similar overall native resolution performance, AMD leads in rasterization and Nvidia leads in ray tracing.

Sapphire RX 7900 XT Pulse

Sapphire's Pulse cards represent the base model designs from the company, with no extras like RGB lighting. You do get a support bracket for the card, though this sort of bracket tends to be far less user-friendly than the "kickstands" provided with some other GPUs. On the other hand, the support bracket screws into the case, so it won't shift around if you happen to carry your PC into a different room.

The Sapphire RX 7900 XT Pulse is a relatively large card at 313x134x53 mm. It's a triple-slot card for all intents and purposes — even if it's technically only a "2.7-slot" design, you can't really fit anything in that third overlapped slot. It weighs 1417g as well, which isn't too bad given the dimensions. For comparison, the reference AMD 7900 XT card measures 276x113x51.5 mm and weighs 1490g.

AMD's card is quite a bit more compact, but that also tends to impact cooling performance and noise levels, which is arguably the biggest draw for Sapphire's Pulse model. We'll get into the details on temperatures and noise later in the the review.

As you'd expect for a >300W graphics card, you get triple fans to go along with the large dimensions. Sapphire's latest designs use "angular velocity blade" fans, which are supposed to move more air and last longer than previous Sapphire designs. Sapphire notes that the inclusion of the outer rim helps to improve downward air pressure, by up to 44%, with 19% more airflow. The fans are also 95mm in diameter, compared to AMD's reference design that uses 78mm fans.

The radiator has six heatpipes to help carry heat away from the GPU core and VRAM, which again represents a typical design for graphics cards with a 300W or higher TBP rating. The only real improvement would be to opt for a full vapor chamber instead of heatpipes, and that's something the Made By AMD cards use.

Video connectivity consists of dual HDMI 2.1 ports and dual DisplayPort 2.1 UHBR13.5 ports. The HDMI ports have a peak bandwidth of 48 Gbps while the DP2.1 ports offer up 54 Gbps of bandwidth. Uncompressed resolution support for AMD's latest RDNA 3 GPUs tops out at 4K and 229 Hz on DP2.1, while DSC (Display Stream Compression) can provide "visually lossless" 4K at up to 480 Hz. Do note that we're nowhere near getting 480 Hz 4K displays, however, with the fastest options right now being 240 Hz models.

Sapphire RX 7900 XT Test Setup

Our graphics card test system was updated earlier this year to use Intel's fastest Core i9-13900K, with all the bells and whistles. We tested the Sapphire RX 7900 XT card using AMD's most recent 23.5.2 drivers, while the other AMD cards were tested with 23.3.2 through 23.5.1. All the cards in this review have been retested in the past month or two, without Windows 11's Virtualization Based Security enabled.

Our initial review of the RX 7900 XT looked at performance across all resolutions and settings that we normally test (1080p medium, 1080p ultra, 1440p ultra, and 4K ultra). It also had professional and AI benchmarks. For third-party cards like this Sapphire Pulse, we'll limit our testing to 1440p and 4K ultra, as that's the primary target for graphics cards that cost $800 or more. Results in other tests should have similar margins to the gaming results.

Our test PC includes an MSI Z790 DDR5 motherboard, G.Skill DDR5 memory, and a Sabrent 4TB SSD — which we promptly filled to about half its total capacity. be quiet! also supplied us with its new 1600W Dark Power Pro 13 80 Plus Titanium rated power supply. That would have been overkill, back before cards like the RTX 4090 were a thing.

We're including a collection of current and previous generation GPUs, with the Nvidia results from the RTX 40-series (but skipping the significantly more expensive RTX 4090). If you want to see how the RX 7900 XT stacks up against other GPUs, check out our GPU benchmarks hierarchy.

We have Nvidia PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware as well, which means we can grab real power use, GPU clocks, and more during all of our gaming benchmarks. We'll have most of the details for power testing in a few pages.

• MORE: Best Graphics Cards
• MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
• MORE: All Graphics Content

We have 1440p and 4K ultra benchmarks for this Sapphire RX 7900 XT review. Given the $799 typical price (with sales bringing it down to $779), we'll start with the 1440p ultra performance before moving on to the 4K gaming results.

Here's the overview, first with the 15-game full suite, and with separate rasterization-only and DXR-only (i.e. ray tracing) charts. We'll discuss the individual game results further down the page.

First, overall performance ends up exactly tied (a 0.1 fps difference) with the reference RX 7900 XT. It's interesting, because we've seen other tests of Sapphire's card where it's a couple of percent faster. That's what we'd normally expect, since it has a higher power limit and a minor factory overclock, but there's always a bit of variability between GPUs.

Maybe our sample card was a bit of a dud, or maybe our reference card is a bit better than typical. It's not drivers, either, as we previously tested the card with the same drivers that we used for our most recent reference GPU testing. Regardless, there's really nothing to worry about as no one would notice a less than 10% difference without running benchmarks.

The Sapphire card also lands between the RX 6950 XT and RTX 4070 Ti in performance, but here we need to look at the rasterization and ray tracing charts as well. AMD's GPU ends up slightly ahead of the 4070 Ti in rasterization performance with a 6% lead, but conversely ends up trailing by 19% in the DXR (DirectX Raytracing) test suite.

That's expected in general, and how much you want to weight rasterization versus ray tracing performance is a contentious subject. Some will argue ray tracing is just technical snake oil, others hail it as the next big thing for graphics. There are currently close to 150 games that have some form of ray tracing. That's the "good" news.

Subjectively, however, we'd say probably only fifteen or so rate as reasonably popular games where the RT effects make a noticeable difference. Not coincidentally, six of those games are in our test suite. We'd also say that good upscaling (DLSS, XeSS, or one of the better FSR2 implementations) often ends up being more useful than token ray tracing support.

Across our 15-game test suite, the Sapphire and reference 7900 XT cards are basically equivalent, with a spread of -2.2% to +4.3% for the Sapphire card. Forza Horizon 5 shows the biggest change, and that could be due to drivers or a recent game patch. Everything else is within margin of error.

Switching gears to the Sapphire versus RTX 4070 Ti, we'll split that up into rasterization and ray tracing games. The spread for rasterization ends up ranging from -7.2% (Total War: Warhammer 3) to +25.9% (Borderlands 3) in favor of Sapphire. DXR meanwhile is a clean sweep for Nvidia, with anywhere from a 10.3% (Metro Exodus Enhanced) to a 57.1% (Minecraft) lead for Nvidia. Not surprisingly, but the most demanding DXR games are the ones that favor Nvidia the most. Those are also the games where ray tracing makes the most noticeable visual difference.

• MORE: Best Graphics Cards
• MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
• MORE: All Graphics Content

The standings don't change much with our 4K ultra test results, though AMD does close the gap with the RTX 4070 Ti just a touch. Overall, Sapphire ends up 3.4% slower than the RTX 4070 Ti, with a slightly larger lead in rasterization performance and a slightly worse loss in DXR performance. Specifically, it's 10.6% faster in our rasterization suite, and 21.2% slower in the DXR suite.

If you ever want a good reason for upscaling algorithms, 4K gaming will suffice. Not only can  you get quite good results when doing a modest 2x upscaling (e.g. going from 2715x1527 to 3840x2160). That's because the more data you have, the 'easier' it is for AI and conventional algorithms to fill in the gaps.

Put another way, let's look at the extreme. Imagine a 2x upscale from 5x5 pixels to 7x7 pixels. The algorithm would need to interpolate from 25 total pixels to 49 total pixels, but there's simply not as much detail to start with. Conversely, when the target ends up being 8.3 million pixels interpolated from 4.1 pixels, there's a wealth of information available.

From a performance perspective, upscaling to hit 4K also has some great benefits. We explained why 4K requires so much more VRAM than 1440p or 1080p, and while games can do things in various ways, the end result is that rendering at 2K and then upscaling to 4K can result in some excellent performance gains with a relatively minimal loss in image fidelity. You're also not likely to be CPU limited when targeting 4K, which isn't always the case with upscaling to 1080p.

Native 4K performance in our rasterization suite ranges from 48.9 fps in A Plague Tale: Requiem to 107.1 fps in Far Cry 6. Only two of the games failed to average 60 fps or more (though Flight Simulator barely got there). But with the Sapphire RX 7900 XT, or the RTX 4070 Ti, every rasterization game is very much playable, particularly if you drop from ultra to high settings.

For our DXR suite, things aren't quite so nice. Only Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Metro Exodus Enhanced can even break 30 fps at native 4K, and Control nearly gets there with 29.5 fps. But the other three games are in the high teens or low 20s. Even with FSR2 upscaling, which only three of the six games support, getting to 60 fps might be a stretch.

You could of course use a different suite of games for testing to make the results look better, or use lower settings (particularly in the DXR games) to close the gap between AMD and Nvidia GPUs. Or you could enable upscaling where supported, in which case DLSS remains more widely used than FSR2. But ultimately, the RX 7900 XT and RTX 4070 Ti do deliver relatively similar overall experiences, even though AMD's card has 20GB while Nvidia's GPU only has 12GB of VRAM.

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Our power, clocks, and temperature testing now utilizes the same test suite as our gaming benchmarks, as the PCAT v2 hardware and FrameView software lets us collect this data alongside frametimes. We're also using our updated Core i9-13900K platform, so we're less likely to have CPU or platform limitations playing a role.

We have 1440p and 4K charts for power, GPU clocks, and temperatures below. Then we do a test using Metro Exodus at whatever "demanding for the GPU being tested" means — 1440p ultra in the case of the Sapphire RX 7900 XT — and after letting the game run for 15 minutes or more, we check noise levels. This basically represents the worst-case workload and maximum noise, though in practice a lot of games will end up at similar levels.

We'll present additional tables and information about efficiency (FPS/W) and value (FPS/$) at the bottom of the page.

The Sapphire RX 7900 XT does as advertised and uses slightly more power across our test suite than the reference 7900 XT, at both 1440p and 4K. In both cases, the Sapphire card averaged 322W of power use, while the reference card used 307W and 308W. Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti meanwhile needed just 246W on average at 1440p, and 262W at 4K.

This is an ongoing issue with AMD's RDNA 3 architecture. If you look at RDNA 2 and Ampere, the previous generation GPUs, AMD generally held an advantage in efficiency. Part of that was because Nvidia used Samsung 8N (a 10nm-class node) while AMD used TSMC N7. Now, they're basically on the same 5nm-class node (TSMC 4N and N5, for Nvidia and AMD, respectively). It seems like Nvidia's architecture is overall simply more efficient.

There's also the question of how much extra power AMD had to use by opting for GPU chiplets instead of a monolithic die. We may never know for certain, but certainly there's room for improvement from AMD. Sapphire for its part managed to provide equivalent performance while drawing more power, which definitely isn't the best way of doing things.

GPU clock speeds on their own don't mean too much, unless you're comparing within the same architecture and even GPU. And that's where things get a bit interesting with the Sapphire RX 7900 XT. On paper, it has a higher 2450 MHz boost clock while the reference card 'only' has a 2400 MHz boost clock. But we know from experience that AMD's latest generation GPUs are likely to exceed that conservative boost clock.

With the reference RX 7900 XT, across our 15-game suite, we measured average GPU clocks of 2573 MHz — 173 MHz above the advertised boost clock. The Sapphire model meanwhile only averaged 2488 MHz, 38 MHz above its advertised speed. That's a 1440p, incidentally. The clocks drop quite at bit at 4K, where the reference card still averaged 2494 MHz, but the Sapphire card dropped to just 2290 MHz.

Looking at these results, we can't help but wonder if our Sapphire card was a bit of a lemon. We've since returned the card to the company, but other sites' results don't seem to corroborate with our results. There's a good chance a different Pulse card would have performed better than what we've shown here.

Finally, we have to look at temperatures and noise levels as a linked pair. Higher fan speeds can drop noise levels, and conversely lower fan speeds can result in higher temperatures but less noise. There's a balancing act that needs to be maintained, and generally speaking GPU core temperatures of less than 80C aren't a concern.

Looking just at the thermals, the Sapphire RX 7900 XT ran about 3–5C hotter than the reference card. Neither one averaged more than 70C, so temperatures aren't a concern, but we can only get a better idea of how the cards compare by also looking at fan speeds and/or noise levels.

We check noise levels using an SPL (sound pressure level) meter placed 10cm from the card, with the mic aimed right at the center of the middle fan (on the Sapphire card). This helps minimize the impact of other noise sources like the fans on the CPU cooler. The noise floor of our test environment and equipment is less than 32 dB(A).

After running Metro Exodus for over 15 minutes, the Sapphire RX 7900 XT settled at a fan speed of 38% with a noise level of 40.0 dB(A). While not the quietest GPU we've tested — some of the really large cards run at 37–38 dB(A) — it's equal to or better than most other competing GPUs. The reference AMD 7900 XT on the other hand had a 48.7 dB(A) result, with the fans running at 63%.

There's no question in my mind that the Sapphire cooling solution ends up performing better overall, even if the actual temperatures are slightly higher. The reference cards get relatively loud, while Sapphire's fans and cooler generally do a better job while keeping noise levels in check.

We also tested with a static fan speed of 75%, which caused the Sapphire RX 7900 XT to generate 56.2 dB(A) of noise. That's similar to a lot of other GPUs, but not hugely important as you shouldn't normally see the fans spinning at more than 50% or so.

GPU Value and Efficiency

This final gallery of images shows the full performance test suite, along with the above power, clocks, and temperature information. Latency is also provided, at least in some of the games (depending on the GPU and drivers used).

We've calculated efficiency in FPS/W for the various games, plus value in FPS/$ using the best current online prices we could find (usually at Newegg or Amazon, though B&H and Best Buy were also checked). We've summarized those results in the above table (based on 1440p performance and power), sorted by overall value.

As expected, even though cards like the RTX 4060 Ti have a (perhaps deservedly) bad rap, their lower prices still make them a "better value" than the more expensive GPUs. It's the typical diminishing returns in practice. However, we should note that we're only factoring in the cost of the graphics card. If you were to include a decent high-end PC, that changes the equation a lot. That's what the "PC FPS/$" column at the far right.

For the system cost, we used a Core i7-13700K, Arctic Freezer II 240 cooler, ASRock Z790 PG Lightning motherboard, 32GB G.Skill DDR5-6400 CL32 memory, Solidigm P44 Pro 2TB SSD, Phanteks Eclipse P400A case, and Phanteks Revolt Pro 850W gold PSU. Combined, those cost $1,074 at the time of writing. For a complete PC, the "best value" (in quotes because there's an element of subjectivity involved) switches to the most expensive RTX 4080 first, then the RTX 4070 Ti, followed by the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT. Food for thought if you're planning a complete system update!

Efficiency also puts the RTX 4080 in first, followed by the RTX 4070, RTX 4060 Ti, RTX 4070 Ti, and then finally the RX 7900 XT (reference card). Sapphire's GPU ranks two steps lower, just behind the RX 7900 XTX, thanks to its higher power draw. There's still a decent gap in efficiency between it and the RX 6800, however, which was the highest efficiency GPU from AMD's RX 6000-series.

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The Sapphire RX 7900 XT Pulse is a bit of a curiosity, as far as our test results go. On paper, it should be faster than the reference 7900 XT. Other sites show it as being a few percent faster. Our particular sample, though? Not quite so great, with higher power draw and at best equivalent performance. We suspect most Pulse cards will fare slightly better, as it's a bit surprising that the card didn't clearly beat the reference design in performance.

It also used about 5% more power on average while delivering equivalent performance, and temperatures were a few degrees Celsius higher under load. But the good news is that the fans and cooling are clearly superior, with noise levels peaking at 40 dB(A) compared to the reference card that gets noticeably louder at 49 dB(A).

If you're looking for an inexpensive RX 7900 XT and you don't care about RGB lighting or flashy designs, the Sapphire Pulse is a great option. If you prefer something with more bling, the ASRock Phantom Gaming OC has some RGB to brighten your day, for the same $779 asking price. And that's probably the best news overall: RX 7900 XT cards can now be had for $120 less than the original (too high) launch MSRP.

That price change was pretty much required, as performance in general ends up being roughly equivalent to the RTX 4070 Ti. Rasterized performance at native rendering is faster, but ray tracing is slower, and DLSS still provides better quality upscaling, in more games, than FSR 2.

AMD does provide you with a lot more VRAM, 20GB versus Nvidia's competing card with just 12GB. If you're worried about games starting to push into requiring 16GB or more VRAM, it's potentially a safer bet. Or you can just recognize that HD texture packs often do very little for image fidelity and stick with settings that won't exceed 12GB (unless a game is poorly coded, which unfortunately seems to be the case with a lot of recent ports).

Which of these high-end cards ends up being the better pick will ultimately come down to the games you want to play, and what settings you want to use. If you want all the bells and whistles turned on, you might think that the 20GB VRAM trumps 12GB, and it does in some cases. But then you also have to consider that ray tracing will almost always favor Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti, sometimes by a lot, even if it doesn't have as much VRAM.

We're also still waiting for AMD's lower cost RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT GPUs to launch. That will likely happen in the next month or two, though we're not sure on pricing just yet. We're also not sure where performance will land, and it could end up that a $600 RX 7800 XT will only roughly match the existing $600-ish RX 6950 XT.

This generation of GPUs increasingly feels like a step sideways from AMD, moving to GPU chiplets and prepping for future generation architectures while cutting costs, rather than a significant step forward in performance. Yes, the top RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT are faster than the previous generation, but we could see diminishing gains further down the RX 7000-series product stack.

For top-shelf performance from AMD, the RX 7900 XTX can still beat the RX 7900 XT by 18% at 4K ultra. That's a pretty big jump, accompanied by a 21% increase in price (for the least expensive cards right now). The Sapphire RX 7900 XT Pulse meanwhile also beats the previous generation RX 6950 XT by 20% at 4K, for a 31% increase in price (using current online prices). Prices are fluctuating quite a lot right now, likely due to the impending Navi 32 launch, so keep that in mind.

The Sapphire RX 7900 XT ultimately ends up as a fine option for those shopping in the upper range of AMD GPUs. It's not exceptional, but it's better than some of the other alternatives, depending on your perspective. If you're planning to sit this generation out, it will probably be another 16–18 months before we start seeing the next generation GPUs that might have something more to say about performance, hopefully at better prices (though we wouldn't count on that).

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PC memory and graphics card maker Inno3D has announced "Stealth Cable Management" is coming to a subset of its Ada Lovelace graphics cards. Starting with upcoming GeForce RTX 4070, GeForce RTX 4060 Ti and GeForce RTX 4060 Twin X2 / OC White Edition graphics cards, users will find the 8-pin power connector is recessed within the center-rear of the card.

Inno3D noted recessed cables and connectors was something of a trend at the recent Computex show, and thinks it will be a more important part of computer component product design going forward. The firm appears to have brainstormed the benefits of recessed cables, and users should benefit from the following key advantages of its "unique approach":

• Improved cable management
• Cleaner look for better aesthetics
• Facilitates gentler bends in the power cables
• Streamlined case airflow
• White cards come with white power cables

Regular readers will be aware that this isn't a unique innovation from Inno3D, as the updated Gigabyte RTX 4090 WindForce v2 design also gained a recessed cable connector, last week, as a refinement compared to the previous model.

In its press release about the Stealth Cable Management enhanced graphics cards, Inno3D implies that this feature will come to the white graphics cards first. It specifically says that "The GeForce RTX 4070, GeForce RTX 4060 Ti and GeForce 4060 GPUs will come bundled with white power cables, which perfectly complement the card's overall white theme." We don't have any mention of, or images of, the black models (black / grey) with this power cable recess design.

Plugging in the power connector on these new models won't be as straight forward as many are used to. Inno3D says that one half of the backplate can be lifted to insert the 8-pin PCIe power connector head. We guess it then screws down and the connector block becomes captive. Of course you will also need a modular PSU to make use of the Inno3D cable provided.

We have been talking about graphics card power connectors and cables probably more than we would have liked to in recent months. Since the launch of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 there has been quite a long list of cabling / connector issues affecting PC enthusiasts and DIYers. Pushing the advancement of cabling from another angle is the growing expectation of PC makers that a machine will look magnificent both inside and out.

We don't know when these new recessed power cable connector graphics cards from Inno3D will hit shelves, and / or if there will be any premium to pay compared to existing designs. Inno3D hints that it will be watching the sales success of this white mid-range Stealth Cable Management series, and may end up applying the same design change to more GPUs, if its toe-in-the-water isn't burned.

We showed benchmarks of the PNY GeForce RTX 4070 Verto Dual in our initial Nvidia RTX 4070 Founders Edition launch review. Then a bunch of other stuff came along, like the RTX 4060 Ti and RX 7600 launches, but now we're getting around to various third-party reviews. These are some of the best graphics cards, for gaming and other purposes, and the RTX 4070 looks to hit the sweet spot in terms of specs and pricing.

At its core, the RTX 4070 performs a lot like the previous generation RTX 3080, despite having 2GB more VRAM but a much narrower 192-bit memory interface. That's thanks to the Nvidia Ada Lovelace architecture, and specifically the inclusion of up to 8MB of L2 cache per 32-bit chunk of memory interface. The additional memory can help in a few instances, but higher resolutions also tend to prefer the increased raw bandwidth of the 3080's 320-bit interface.

Let's start with the usual specs table before getting into the specifics of the PNY card.

The above specs table shows the ten GPUs we'll be using for this review. The PNY RTX 4070 Verto Dual and Nvidia RTX 4070 Founders Edition have identical specs, since both use the reference clocks. There's not much more we can add.

The RTX 4070 lands at a $599.99 MSRP, and there are even cards periodically available for less than that — like right now, you can pick up the RTX 4070 from Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, or Zotac with a $50 instant rebate using code "ZIPDADS" (for Fathers' Day, if that wasn't obvious). PNY's card unfortunately isn't part of that deal. It's also "while funds last," so you may or may not be able to take advantage of that offer.

That sort of deal does speak volumes about graphics card sales in general. The past several Black Fridays and Prime Days, for example, had very few if any noteworthy GPU deals, but that's a straight $50 discount from Newegg on a graphics card that released less than two months ago. It's a safe bet that Nvidia could also drop the prices on all of its GPUs $50 or so without incurring too much pain.

Short-term sales aside, we can't help but feel the RTX 4070 should be selling for a lot less than its MSRP. It's faster than the previous generation RTX 3070, but it also comes with a substantially smaller die size. 294.5 mm^2 on TSMC 4N compared to 392.5 mm^2 on Samsung 8N likely means the AD104 chips do cost more, but Nvidia should still get about 190 chips per wafer. Even at $19,000 per 4N wafer, that's only $100 per chip (and Nvidia probably pays less than that due to the number of wafers it orders).

PNY GeForce RTX 4070 Verto Dual

PNY uses a nondescript box for its base model RTX 4070. That's fine, as most people are far more interested in the performance and graphics card than in the packaging. Inside the box sits the card in an anti-static bag... and that's pretty much it.

There's no support stand here, which, considering the card weighs 687g, shouldn't be a problem. The card's dimensions are 247x120x40 mm. Nvidia's RTX 4070 Founders Edition by way of comparison measures 244x111x40, so it's just a touch shorter in both length and height, though it's quite a bit heavier at 1021g.

PNY uses a dual-fan configuration, as implied by the model name. Each fan is 85mm in diameter, so smaller than some cards. More importantly, there's no integrated rim to improve static pressure and airflow. That gives Nvidia's reference card a double advantage: Its 91mm fans have more area, and they include a rim around the outside diameter.

The radiator also carries this same approach of not going hog-wild on cooling capacity. There are plenty of heatsink fins, but only three heatpipes running through them. The RTX 4070 only has a 200W TGP (Total Graphics Power), so the cooling should be sufficient, but as we'll see later, this modest setup ultimately results in higher fan speeds and noise levels.

As with most recent Nvidia GPUs, you get three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs and a single HDMI 2.1 port. With DSC (Display Stream Compression), you can get "visually lossless" 4K at 240Hz. Some might quibble about how good the image truly looks, but having tested it, we don't have any complaints — and most of the time, at 4K you won't be pushing framerates anywhere near the 240 Hz maximum refresh rate.

PNY RTX 4070 Test Setup

Our graphics card test system was updated earlier this year to use Intel's fastest Core i9-13900K, with all the bells and whistles. We tested the PNY RTX 4070 card using Nvidia's 531.42 launch drivers, though as far as we can tell nothing substantial has changed with the latest 535.98 that came out on May 30. All of the cards in this review have been retested in the past month or two, without Windows 11's Virtualization Based Security enabled.

Our initial review of the RTX 4070 looked at performance across all resolutions and settings that we normally test (1080p medium, 1080p ultra, 1440p ultra, and 4K ultra). It also had professional and AI benchmarks, and performance results with upscaling including DLSS 3 (see how to enable DLSS 3). For third-party cards like this PNY RTX 4070, we'll limit our testing to 1080p/1440p/4K ultra, without looking at the other workloads — everything should be relatively similar margins as the gaming results.

Our test PC includes an MSI Z790 DDR5 motherboard, G.Skill DDR5 memory, and a Sabrent 4TB SSD — which we promptly filled to about half its total capacity. be quiet! also supplied us with its new 1600W Dark Power Pro 13 80 Plus Titanium rated power supply. That would have been overkill, back before cards like the RTX 4090 were a thing.

We're including a collection of current and previous generation GPUs, with the Nvidia results all from the RTX 40-series. If you want to see how the RTX 4070 stacks up against other GPUs, check out our GPU benchmarks hierarchy.

We have Nvidia PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware as well, which means we can grab real power use, GPU clocks, and more during all of our gaming benchmarks. We'll have most of the details for power testing in a few pages.

PNY RTX 4070 Overclocking

Our standard approach to overclocking graphics cards is to use MSI Afterburner and then max out the power slider, but the PNY card is locked to 100%. So we left that alone and played with the GPU and GDDR6X clocks. We ultimately achieved a stable (for our benchmark suite) +200 MHz GPU and +1750 MHz GDDR6X overclock. The memory overclock suggests that this is 24 Gbps Micron memory, even though it's marked as standard 21 Gbps memory.

The thing about the overclock is that, without an increased power limit, it's not as effective as with other GPUs. We've got overclocked results from the 4070 Founders Edition in the charts as well (+225 MHz GPU, +1350 MHz GDDR6X), and the increased power limit seems to be the deciding factor.

Regardless, there's a pretty large gap between the RTX 4070 and the RTX 4070 Ti. With 5888 CUDA cores versus 7680 cores, you'd need to run the RTX 4070 at about 3.4 GHz just to match the reference 4070 Ti. That's not going to happen, possibly not even with liquid nitrogen. All told, our overclock on the PNY RTX 4070 yielded a 6% improvement in performance, while the RTX 4070 Ti ends up being around 25% faster than the stock 4070.

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We have 1080p, 1440p, and 4K ultra benchmarks for this PNY review. Because it has a $599 MSRP, we feel that starting with 1440p ultra is most appropriate. We'll cover the 1080p results next, and finish with 4K gaming results (which are mostly academic, as you'd need DLSS to get good performance in many games at 4K ultra).

Here's the overview, first with the 15-game full suite, and then with separate rasterization-only and DXR-only (i.e. ray tracing) charts. We'll discuss the individual results further down the page.

There's very little to add to the RTX 4070 story when looking at the PNY card. It's effectively tied with the reference RTX 4070 Founders Edition, with all the results being within the expected margin of error.

Against other GPUs, the RTX 4070 and RX 6950 XT trade blows, with the 4070 leading in ray tracing games and mostly trailing in rasterization performance (Total War: Warhammer III being the sole exception on the latter). DLSS upscaling will generally favor Nvidia's new card, because it's both more widely available and it looks better, with Frame Generation being the potential smooth (as in, frame smoothing) cherry on top.

Across our 15-game test suite, the PNY and Founders Edition 4070 cards are within 2% of each other in every test. We'll need to look to other aspects to find some differentiating factors.

One interesting point is just how much the gap has grown between the various Nvidia GPUs this generation. The 4070 ends up being 33% faster than the 4060 Ti, while the 4070 Ti in turn delivers 24% higher performance. Compared to the previous generation, the RTX 3070 was only about 12% faster than the RTX 3060 Ti, while the RTX 3070 Ti tacked on just 7% more performance than the 3070.

That mostly applies to other 30-series versus 40-series comparisons as well, though the 4080 and 4070 Ti at least are about the same 20~25 percent difference as the previous generation. We'll have to see where the upcoming RTX 4060 and, eventually, RTX 4050 land. The 3060 Ti was 34% faster than the vanilla 3060, despite having less VRAM. On paper at least, the 4060 Ti has 46% more compute than the 4060.

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The PNY RTX 4070, and RTX 4070 in general, does a bit better at 1080p ultra than at 1440p ultra. That's partly because the large L2 cache helps more at lower resolutions, and partly because CPU bottlenecks also come into play. Overall, the 4070 comes in just a bit ahead of the RX 6950 XT, where it was just a bit behind at 1440p.

We could point out that it's fair to expect any $600 graphics card to easily handle 1080p gaming. After all, even the $350 RX 6750 XT averages over 60 fps, though as usual, AMD's GPUs struggle a bit more in some of the ray tracing games. Likewise, AMD's GPUs do better overall in rasterization games. Anyway, let's move on.

The spread in the individual games, when comparing the PNY and Founders Edition 4070 cards, is meaningless. That's as you'd expect, given they have the same reference clock speeds.

The RX 6950 XT remains the closest competition, with a slightly higher price right now. PNY's card just edges past it, by 1% overall, with a 20% lead in the DXR test suite and a 9% loss in the rasterization games.

What the above performance charts don't show (and we'll get to this in a couple of pages) is that the RTX 4070 basically matches the RX 6950 XT in performance while using 178W on average at 1080p, while the RX 6950 XT uses 307W. That means you need a better PSU if you want to run AMD's previous gen halo card, and that's still not accounting for DLSS upscaling or frame generation.

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Wrapping up with the 4K ultra results, as you'd expect, the PNY RTX 4070 starts to struggle. Several of the rasterized games still break 60 fps, but only Spider-Man: Miles Morales breaks 30 fps in our DXR tests.

4K definitely needs help, and if you enable DLSS upscaling, performance improves a lot. We could debate about whether or not AI-based upscaling to 4K counts, but unless you're using a substantially more potent GPU or running lighter games, it's really the only way 4K is viable on GPUs like the 4070.

Overall, the RX 6950 XT now leads the PNY 4070 by 3%, which again doesn't mean a lot. It's still the same split between DXR games favoring Nvidia and rasterization games favoring AMD. And while we haven't said much about some of the other GPUs, skipping 4K and getting a card like the RX 6750 XT certainly makes sense if you're on a budget.

Native 4K in the rasterized games ranges from 35 fps in A Plague Tale: Requiem to 81 fps in Forza Horizon 5. So all nine of those games are at least playable, even without upscaling. Of the games that don't hit 60 fps, it's also worth mentioning that four of the six games support DLSS, and two others also support Frame Generation.

The DXR games are another matter. Even with DLSS support in all six games, most aren't going to get to 60 fps or more without Performance mode upscaling, and possibly Frame Generation as well. But you could drop to high settings instead of ultra and probably make up the difference.

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Our power, clocks, and temperature testing now utilizes the same test suite as our gaming benchmarks, as the PCAT v2 hardware and FrameView software lets us collect this data alongside frametimes. We're also using our updated Core i9-13900K platform, so we're less likely to have CPU or platform limitations playing a role.

We have 1080p, 1440p, and 4K charts for power, GPU clocks, and temperatures below. Then we do a test using Metro Exodus Enhanced at whatever "demanding for the GPU being tested" means, and after letting the game run for 15 minutes or more, we check noise levels. We'll present additional tables and information about efficiency (FPS/W) and value (FPS/$) at the bottom of the page.

Nvidia's Ada Lovelace architecture proves very efficient overall, and PNY locks down power use more than Nvidia's reference card, so even when overclocked power use doesn't break 200W. The maximum average power use we saw was actually just 192W when overclocked, versus 198W running stock (though we didn't test the overclocked card at 4K ultra or 1080p medium).

The PNY RTX 4070 uses less power than AMD's RX 6800 while delivering performance closer to that of the RX 6950 XT. Even if we drop the ray tracing results, it would still be equal to the RX 6800 XT in rasterized performance while using over 100W less power. Like we said, it's an efficient GPU.

GPU clock speeds on their own don't mean too much, but it's interesting how much clocks have shot up with the latest Nvidia RTX 40-series. Taking a page from AMD's RDNA 2 book, Nvidia focused on improving clocks and is now routinely hitting 2.6–2.8 GHz, where the previous generation RTX 30-series usually topped out at around 1.9 GHz (without serious manual overclocking).

Here's where we also start to see some of the low-level limitations of the PNY RTX 4070. It's nearly as fast as the Founders Edition, but clocks are typically slightly lower, and the gap widens at more demanding settings. Overclocking also hits power limits on the PNY card, so that it runs about 100 MHz slower than the FE card at 1440p.

Temperatures are the other part of the equation, and it's possible to tune cards for higher clocks by cranking up fan speeds and noise levels. The PNY RTX 4070 doesn't run hot, but it does run warmer than the reference card by about 4C–5C. Let's look at noise levels to see what's going on...

We check noise levels using an SPL (sound pressure level) meter placed 10cm from the card, with the mic aimed right at the center of one of the fans (the right fan on the PNY card). This helps minimize the impact of other noise sources like the fans on the CPU cooler. The noise floor of our test environment and equipment is less than 32 dB(A).

After running Metro Exodus for over 15 minutes, the PNY RTX 4070 settled in at a fan speed of 57% and a noise level of 42.7 dB(A). That's okay in terms of noise, but it's still 3 dB(A) higher than the Founders Edition. It's also interesting that both the FE and PNY cards are at relatively high fan speed percentages, meaning there's not as much room for additional cooling.

We also tested with a static fan speed of 75%, which caused the PNY RTX 4070 to generate 51.4 dB(A) of noise. So the stock noise levels are pretty average, with larger cards typically making less noise. Conversely, at 75% fan speed this is one of the quieter results... though the RTX 4070 FE still does better.

GPU Value and Efficiency

This final gallery of images shows the full performance test suite, along with the above power, clocks, and temperature information. Latency is also provided, at least in some of the games (depending on the GPU and drivers used).

We've calculated efficiency in FPS/W for the various games, plus value in FPS/$ using the best current online prices we could find (usually at Newegg or Amazon, though B&H and Best Buy were also checked). We've summarized those results in the above table (based on 1440p performance and power), sorted by overall value.

It shouldn't be too surprising that the RX 6750 XT is the best overall value out of the GPUs we've tested, followed by the RTX 4060 Ti and RX 6800 XT. Lower prices will go a long way toward making a GPU a better value, and those are the least expensive cards we've included in this review. The Nvidia and PNY RTX 4070 cards are tied for fourth, followed closely by the RX 6950 XT. Note also that the spread in FPS/$ for a lot of the cards is very narrow, with the RX 7900 XT to RTX 4070 all in the 0.111–0.122 range.

Meanwhile, the RTX 4080 ranks as the most efficient GPU we've tested to date, at least for 1440p ultra, with the PNY RTX 4070 coming in second — just edging out the RTX 4070 FE. All of the Nvidia RTX 40-series GPUs have better efficiency than any of the AMD GPUs, with a pretty sizeable drop going from the RTX 4070 Ti (0.367 FPS/W) to the RX 7900 XT (0.281 FPS/W).

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The PNY RTX 4070 doesn't try to do anything wild. There's no RGB lighting, no factory overclocks, and not even an option to crank up the power limit for manual overclocking. It's not a card targeted at enthusiasts, in other words, but instead something that OEMs and system integrators might find useful. It will happily chug along at less than 200W, providing good performance.

If you want a flashier RTX 4070 card, or something quieter, there are plenty of options. Depending on the week or month, some of those cards might even cost less than the PNY RTX 4070 Verto Dual. That's fine, and there's room for all types of cards. Some will undoubtedly like the no-frills aesthetic that's on tap.

But if we're being frank ("Hi, I'm Frank..."), we want graphics cards to either beat the Nvidia reference card on price, features, or performance. PNY doesn't do any of those. It's close enough to call performance a tie, but the RTX 4070 Founders Edition will still be a better card for most people.

Unless you hate the superfluous 12VHPWR 16-pin connector and the adapter cable that comes with Nvidia's card. And there are definitely good reasons to dislike it! In a typical case, you end up with a stiff adapter cable that sticks out several inches above the top of the card. Then you have to make the side panel of your case fit on properly, without putting too much strain on the cable.

If you have a high-end ATX 3.0 power supply, maybe it won't matter. But how many people are actually buying high-end PSUs with native 12VHPWR support for a 200W graphics card? We still don't have a good explanation for why Nvidia has pushed so hard on use of the 16-pin connector (or the 12-pin precursor for it's RTX 30-series Founders Editions). It's not like they're provably better, and the melting cable issue still hasn't really ended.

Is that one item a big enough reason to opt for the PNY RTX 4070 over a different model? Perhaps! But if so, know that there are MSI, Asus, Zotac, and Gigabyte models that will also suffice. In fact, it's only the higher-end third-party 4070 cards that have 16-pin connectors, and not even all of those.

PNY has other RTX 4070 options as well, with some RGB lighting if that's what you're after. It's a good GPU, going toe to toe with the previous generation RTX 3080 while cutting the price, increasing features, and improving efficiency. That's not the most exciting description of a new GPU, but you could do far worse.

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Razer today announced a new version of its Razer Blade 14 laptop, and it’s quite an intriguing ultraportable. Whereas the current generation is powered by a Ryzen 6900HX processor (8 cores, 16 threads) and your choice of up to a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU, the new 2023 edition of the Razer Blade 14 brings the latest mobile hardware from AMD and Nvidia.

To be more specific, Razer opted for AMD’s Ryzen 7940HS “Phoenix” processor, which AMD bills as the first x86 processor with a dedicated, onboard AI engine. This processor also features an 8-core/16-thread configuration but with a base clock of 4 GHz and a turbo clock of 5 GHz. Razer also upgraded the discrete graphics across-the-board to Nvidia Ada Lovelace architecture. Base configurations get a GeForce RTX 4060 (8GB, 2370MHz boost, 140-watt), but you can step up to the optional RTX 4070 (8GB, 2175MHz boost, 140-watt) if you need more performance.

All systems have a 1TB SSD (upgradable to 4TB), while 16GB of DDR5-5600 memory is standard. If you opt for the RTX 4070, you can upgrade to 32GB of DDR5-5600. The maximum installable memory on the Razer Blade 14 is 64GB using the two onboard SO-DIMM slots.

All that hardware pushes pixels to a 14-inch, QHD+ (2560 x 1600) 16:10 display with a 240Hz refresh rate and AMD FreeSync Premium support. In addition to its anti-glare finish to cut down on reflections, Razer says that it’s spec’d for 500 nits typical brightness and covers 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color space.

Fueling this mobile powerhouse is a 68.1 WHr lithium-ion polymer battery, which powers the Blade 14 for up to 10 hours. On the connectivity front, you’ll find the requisite HDMI 2.1 port, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 (Type-A) ports, two USB 4 (Type-C) ports (up to 100-watt Power Delivery supported) and a 3.5mm combo jack. For your wireless needs, Razer opted for Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 (Qualcomm WCN6856).

1080p webcams are becoming more commonplace on laptops, and Razer is no exception with the Blade 14. However, the company goes one step further by including a privacy shutter for those concerned about nefarious parties spying on you without permission. For your audio needs, you’ll find dual speakers with THX Spatial Audio support. Other features include a Razer Chroma RGB keyboard and a Windows Precision Trackpad.

The Blade 14 is constructed of anodized aluminum that is resistant to your greasy fingerprints and is available in Matte Black or Mercury White (exclusive to the 32GB/RTX 4070 SKU). The laptop measures 12.23 x 8.97 x 0.70 inches and weighs just 4.05 pounds.

The base Blade 14 SKU with 16GB of RAM and an RTX 4060 costs $2,399. Upgrading to the RTX 4070 takes the price to $2,699. Finally, the flagship SKU with the RTX 4070 and 32GB of RAM costs $2,799. The Blade 14 is up for preorder today and will begin shipping on June 20th.

Earlier this year, Nvidia released the RTX 4070 Ti — a renamed and slightly price-reduced take on the "unlaunched" RTX 4080 12GB. Performance was good though hardly revolutionary, features and specs a bit more questionable, and the price was $200 higher than the previous generation RTX 3070 Ti. It's on our list of the best graphics cards, but that's more about the lack of better value alternatives than anything else.

Zotac has teamed up with the new Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse movie in a campaign to try and attract additional interest. That's understandable, considering sales of dedicated graphics cards are currently at their lowest point in decades. Too bad there's no Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse game to go along with the movie, as the last couple of Spider-Man™ games have been quite good.

To be clear, the full name of the card we're reviewing is Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti: Amp Airo — part of the Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse inspired graphics card bundles line. Wherever we refer to the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti going forward, that's the card we're talking about.

[Side note: Yes, we're supposed to put the TM symbol next to every mention of Spider-Man™, because Sony. Also, Sony would love for you to go watch the movie, eye-rolls not included.]

We already know what to expect from Nvidia's Ada Lovelace architecture. There's also now RTX 4070 Ti Founders Edition, though there are reference-clocked cards. Zotac's Amp Airo model comes with a 2,670 MHz boost clock, 60 MHz higher than the base model, which shouldn't make much of a difference in performance.

There's a very good chance that everything you really need to know about this card is contained in its name. Are you massively hyped for the Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse movie? Have you already seen it five times in the theater? Are you hyped enough to drop over $800 on a themed graphics card? If so, Zotac has your back.

There's not much to separate the reference RTX 4070 Ti and the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti Amp Airo. You get a minor bump in boost clock, theoretically increasing performance by 2.3%. That's basically within margin of error for most benchmarks, plus Nvidia's GPUs routinely exceed their stated boost clock. We'll see just how much higher (if at all) Zotac's card clocks later in the review.

Just as important is a look at the wider GPU market that the RTX 4070 Ti competes within. The next step up from Nvidia is the RTX 4080, priced a significant 50% higher. That's a big jump, at which point you could probably talk yourself into going whole hog and buying an RTX 4090.

Incidentally, there's no Zotac RTX 4090 or 4080 Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse models — only the RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4070, and RTX 4060 Ti are getting themed cards. You can also get the RTX 4070 Amp Airo or RTX 4070 Twin Edge with the movie branding, or the RTX 4060 Ti Twin Edge, with the 4070 Ti variant we're looking at being the fastest option.

Zotac RTX 4070 Ti Amp Airo — Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse Edition

Let's talk about the hardware and accessories you get with the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti Amp Airo — Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse Edition card. Of course there's the card itself, which we'll get to momentarily. Besides that, you get movie-themed items including a magnetic backplate, stickers, a tote bag, and a Ztorm figurine (dressed as one of Spider-Man™, Gwen, or Spider-Man™ 2099). Oh, and a box with movie-themed packaging as well.

Some people will love this stuff, maybe. Others will just wonder what the fuss is all about. To each their own. Of course, there's also the 16-pin adapter, which Zotac has as a triple-8-pin variant. That's interesting, as many other RTX 4070 Ti cards only have dual 8-pin connections for the adapter, and Zotac's card isn't really overclocked that much. Requiring an extra 8-pin connector doesn't help anything as far as we can tell.

There's also a support stand for the card, something we've seen with a lot of the RTX 40-series GPUs. It's not quite as nice as some of the stands we've seen, but it's also a lot more compact, which might be good for some cases. I still think Asus's magnetic support stand is one of the better solutions, since the magnet should keep it in place (though I'd exercise caution when moving any case that uses a support stand).

Zotac's card has a slightly rounded front (with the fans), with a thickness of 54mm. The Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse magnetic backplate adds another 2mm to the back of the card. With the backplate, that makes the card's total dimensions 310x123x56 mm — not the largest of cards, but definitely not something that would fit in a cramped case. It's basically a triple-slot card. It also weighs 1,224g with the backplate (but without the 16-pin adapter cable), or 1,142g without the backplate.

The Zotac RTX 4070 Ti does have a decent amount of RGB lighting, with a large "holographic" strip across the top that lights up. The default lighting scheme isn't great, though: It will show blue-green stripes for a minute or two, flash red a couple of times, and then go dark for a few seconds. Or maybe our sample is just a bit glitchy? You can of course change the lighting with Zotac's Firestorm software.

But the real missed opportunity is that there's no lighting whatsoever for the movie-themed backplate. There really needed to be a glowing LED behind Spider-Man™ in his various incarnations. Otherwise, in a typical PC with a window, most people will never even notice the extra bling. Maybe with a fully themed PC build, that wouldn't matter, but a plastic backplate doesn't really jive with people who go all out on case mods and decorations.

About the best thing I can say about the backplate is that, should you decide somewhere down the road that you no longer care about Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse, you can easily remove it and have just a regular old graphics card. Or give it to someone else to stick on their refrigerator, car, or some other metallic surface.

The Zotac RTX 4070 Ti Amp Airo uses a typical triple-fan configuration. The fans are modestly sized at around 88mm in diameter, and they all spin in the same counter-clockwise direction. Also present are the standard triple DisplayPort 1.4a and single HDMI 2.1 connectors we've found on most Nvidia GPUs over the past three years.

There's plenty of heatsink fins, with five heatpipes running through them, to provide sufficient cooling. Again, this is a 285W graphics card, so compared to the 320W to 450W models that have been floating around for the past couple of years, it doesn't need an extreme cooling setup.

It's also noteworthy that the Zotac card doesn't typically even hit 285W. Across our 15-game test suite, the highest power draw we measured during our tests was just under 280W, and quite a few games used less than 250W — including Spider-Man™: Miles Morales, which only needed 225W at 4K on average.

Zotac RTX 4070 Ti Test Setup

Our graphics card test system was updated earlier this year to use Intel's fastest Core i9-13900K, with all the bells and whistles. We tested the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti card using Nvidia's latest 535.98 drivers that came out on May 30. Other GPUs were tested with previous drivers, though most cards have been retested in the past month (this time without Windows 11's Virtualization Based Security enabled).

Our initial review of the RTX 4070 Ti looked at performance across all resolutions and settings that we normally test (1080p medium, 1080p ultra, 1440p ultra, and 4K ultra). It also had professional and AI benchmarks, and performance results with upscaling including DLSS 3. For third-party cards like the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti, we'll limit our testing to 1080p/1440p/4K ultra, without looking at the other workloads — everything should be relatively similar margins as the gaming results.

Our test PC includes an MSI Z790 DDR5 motherboard, G.Skill DDR5 memory, and a Sabrent 4TB SSD — which we promptly filled to about half its total capacity. be quiet! also supplied us with its new 1600W Dark Power Pro 13 80 Plus Titanium rated power supply. That would have been overkill, back before cards like the RTX 4090 were a thing.

We're limiting our test results to the latest generation GPUs, plus a few previous generation AMD GPUs. If you want to see how the RTX 4070 Ti stacks up against other GPUs, check out our GPU benchmarks hierarchy.

We have Nvidia PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware as well, which means we can grab real power use, GPU clocks, and more during all of our gaming benchmarks. We'll have most of the details for power testing in a few pages.

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We have 1080p, 1440p, and 4K benchmarks, and given the $879 MSRP price, the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti better make a good showing in 4K results. It's still more of a 1440p card in our view, or 4K with DLSS, but we're only testing native resolution gaming performance.

Here's the overview, first with the 15-game full suite, and then with separate rasterization-only and DXR-only (i.e. ray tracing) charts. We'll discuss the individual results further down the page.

There's one point to mention first: Nvidia doesn't make reference Founders Edition RTX 4070 Ti cards, so our baseline sample is a third-party card. It's an Asus RTX 4070 Ti TUF Gaming OC, which has a boost clock of 2730 MHz in default mode, or the same 2760 MHz as the Zotac card if you install Asus' GPU Tweak software and enable that. As such, it's little surprise that the two RTX 4070 Ti cards in the chart are generally tied.

The other item we need to note is that games and drivers are in a perpetual state of flux. We retested all of the GPUs in the above charts within the past two months, but the Zotac card was tested in the past week, using the latest 535.28 drivers. Cyberpunk 2077 also received its path tracing update, and some of the other games (Total War: Warhammer III and Forza Horizon 5) have also seen patches. Those patches didn't appear to cause any significant changes in performance, but a few percent here or there wouldn't be shocking.

Outside of the above, the standings are what we've seen before. In rasterization games, AMD's equivalently priced GPUs do better than their counterparts; in ray tracing games, the reverse is true and Nvidia GPUs do better. Lump them all together and we get an overall result, but of course the game selection is up for debate.

Also note that we're not showing DLSS or FSR2 upscaled performance. Our test suite has more games with DLSS support (12) than FSR2 (5), and that tends to hold for the wider market. Factor that in and Nvidia GPUs gain some ground, plus DLSS still looks better than FSR2. How much you want to weight such things is ultimately up to the individual, as some people refuse to view upscaling as anything but a crutch. I take a different view, and if a game has upscaling support, I'm usually happy to get the boost in performance for a minimal tradeoff in image quality, especially at 4K.

With our current test suite, you can see the overall trends in the games. The Zotac RTX 4070 Ti holds a decent lead of 15–25 percent over the RX 7900 XT in the ray tracing games — with Spider-Man™: Miles Morales being nearly a tie (Nvidia leads by 5%) and Minecraft being a massive 60% lead, thanks to its use of "path tracing."

The rasterization games meanwhile aren't a clean sweep for either GPU, with the Zotac card holding a slim 2–4 percent lead in Forza and Warhammer 3, but then trailing by 2% to as much as 20% (Borderlands) in the other games.

Comparing the Zotac and Asus RTX 4070 Ti cards, at least at 4K nearly everything is within margin of error. Cyberpunk and Minecraft are a bit outside that range with a 6% lead on the Asus card, but every other game is less than a 2% difference.

We're not showing a bunch of other GPUs, since this is primarily a look at the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti, but you can see the overall standings in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. While it doesn't have as much VRAM or memory bandwidth, the RTX 4070 Ti in general ends up looking a lot like the RTX 3090 across our test suite. That's the benefit of the much larger L2 cache, as otherwise the 3090 has substantially more memory bandwidth.

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Even though the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti does okay at 4K — and it does much better in games that support DLSS upscaling — 1440p is really the sweet spot for this sort of card. It goes from averaging 51 fps overall (all the DXR games come up well short of 60 fps) to averaging 93 fps (with only Cyberpunk 2077 not managing 60 fps or more).

The Zotac versus Asus 4070 Ti matchup doesn't change, as the two are effectively tied (Cyberpunk is the only game that shows more than a 2% difference). The same goes for the Zotac versus RX 7900 XT, where it still has an overall lead of 4%. It's also 20% faster in our ray tracing suite, and 5% slower in the rasterization suite.

Looking at the individual games, you could argue that there are too many DXR games relative to the market at large, but do note that the performance gap in most rasterization games is less significant.

Borderlands 3 gives AMD a 25% lead, and Far Cry 6 and Watch Dogs Legion are about 15% faster. However, all three games are running at well over 100 fps on either GPU. Nvidia gets a couple rasterization wins as well, in Forza and Warhammer 3 again, while six other games show less than a 5% difference.

Contrast that with AMD losing by 9% or more in each of our DXR tests, with bigger losses in the most demanding titles (Cyberpunk and Minecraft). A 10–15 percent difference might be noticeable, maybe, when your fps is in the triple digits. When you're only getting 40–60 fps, however, 15–20 percent gains are far more useful.

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Wrapping up the testing with our 1080p ultra results, this is mostly to show that there are lots of games where having a 240Hz or even 480Hz display isn't actually that important. Unless you play esports games, naturally.

Overall performance on the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti averaged 128 fps, with the rasterization suite netting 156 fps while the ray tracing games only averaged 95 fps. What's more, if you actually are playing esports games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, basically all of the GPUs in the above chart will easily break 300 fps (provided your CPU is fast enough). Light esports fare doesn't require an $800 GPU, in other words.

Against AMD's RX 7900 XT, the Zotac does slightly better this time with an 8% lead. We're probably bumping into CPU bottlenecks in at least a few of the games, particularly the rasterization games. The two cards are tied overall in rasterization performance at 1080p, but Nvidia still holds a 21% lead in the DXR suite.

As noted above, high refresh rate monitors can only do so much with a lot of games. For the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti, the highest fps we got on any of the games in our test suite was 218 fps. That was in Horizon Zero Dawn, which is also not coincidentally the oldest game in our current test suite. Far Cry 6 and Borderlands 3 are also pushing close to 200 fps, but other games can end up CPU limited at under 100 fps.

Like Flight Simulator, which is one of the best theoretical use cases for Nvidia's DLSS 3 Frame Generation. Even there, however, where the framerate can double, it doesn't actually feel that much faster. That's because Frame Generation is more appropriately viewed as a frame smoothing technique.

We've said it before, but the best-case scenario for Frame Generation is someone looking over your shoulder, or on a high framerate (120fps) Twitch livestream. There, the viewers will simply see smoother visuals, without actually feeling how responsive the game is. It's not that Frame Generation is bad, but it's definitely being wielded as a marketing weapon while the real-world experience isn't nearly as clear-cut as fps charts might suggest.

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Our power, clocks, and temperature testing now utilizes the same test suite as our gaming benchmarks, as the PCAT v2 hardware and FrameView software lets us collect this data alongside frametimes. We're also using our updated Core i9-13900K platform, so we're less likely to have CPU or platform limitations playing a role.

We have 4K, 1440p, and 1080p charts for power, GPU clocks, and temperatures below. Then we do a test using Metro Exodus Enhanced at whatever "demanding for the GPU being tested" means, and after letting the game run for 15 minutes or more, we check noise levels. We'll present additional tables and information about efficiency (FPS/W) and value (FPS/$) at the bottom of the page.

Power use is a strong point for Nvidia's Ada Lovelace architecture. The RTX 4090 might have a high 450W maximum TGP (Total Graphics Power) rating, but there are plenty of games where it will use under 400W. That's still a lot, but not actually that bad when you consider the performance level.

As for the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti, it ties the Asus RTX 4070 Ti and averages 262W at 4K. At 1440p, it uses slightly more power with 251W compared to 246W, while at 1080p it ties the RTX 4080 with 233W — another indication of how much CPU bottlenecks can play a role at lower resolutions. If we had a hypothetical infinitely fast CPU and the rest of the system, maybe the RTX 4070 Ti would land close to its rated 285W TGP in all of our tests, but reality tells a different story.

AMD's RX 7900 XT by way of comparison also lands below its rated 315 TBP (Total Board Power, which is nearly the same thing as TGP), but not by quite as big of a gap. It used 308W at 4K, 307W at 1440p, and 300W at 1080p. The RX 7900 XTX likewise was much closer to its rated 355W.

Clock speeds in themselves aren't that important, but within the same architecture, higher clocks equate to higher performance. Most of Nvidia's latest generation RTX 40-series GPUs have official boost clocks of 2.5–2.6 GHz, and it's obvious that these are very conservative figures.

Zotac's RTX 4070 Ti averaged 2817 MHz at 4K, 2833 MHz at 1440p, and 2843 MHz at 1080p — over 150 MHz higher than its rated 2670 MHz in many cases. The Asus 4070 Ti meanwhile clocked just a smidge higher, suggesting perhaps slightly superior cooling. That leads into the next charts.

Graphics card manufacturers can opt for higher temperatures and lower fan speeds, or vice versa, but usually they aim for a balanced fan speed curve. Zotac's RTX 4070 Ti Amp Airo, here in Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse garb, ends up doing slightly worse than most of the other GPUs.

We should note that all of this testing was done with the plastic backplate attached, which may actually make temperatures slightly worse. We don't think it obstructs airflow, but the metal backplate logically wouldn't dissipate heat as easily with a plastic cover attached. But we need to look at noise levels as well, which brings us to the final chart.

Finally, we check noise levels using an SPL (sound pressure level) meter placed 10cm from the card, with the mic aimed right at the center fan. This helps minimize the impact of other noise sources like the fans on the CPU cooler. The noise floor of our test environment and equipment is less than 32 dB(A).

After running Metro Exodus for over 15 minutes, the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti settled in at a fan speed of 42% and a noise level of 42.5 dB(A). That's pretty good as far as GPUs go, at least among cards that draw close to 285W of power. There are larger and quieter cards, and smaller and noisier cards as well. Zotac doesn't do exceptionally well in the noise department, but it's not particularly loud either.

We also tested with a static fan speed of 75%, which caused the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti to generate 56.0 dB(A) of noise. That's relatively loud, but again a pretty typical result. Most of the time, the card shouldn't be getting anywhere near 75% fan speed.

GPU Value and Efficiency

This final gallery of images shows the full performance test suite, along with the above power, clocks, and temperature information. Latency is also provided, at least in a few of the games. (Spider-Man™: Miles Morales didn't always provide a result for the Nvidia GPUs, and only two games sometimes gave latency values on AMD GPUs.)

We've also calculated efficiency in FPS/W for the various games, plus value in FPS/$ using the best current online prices we could find (usually at Newegg or Amazon, though B&H and Best Buy were also checked). For reference, the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti — Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse card has a price of $879.99. We've summarized those results in the above table (based on 1440p performance and power), sorted by overall value.

All of the Nvidia RTX 40-series GPUs have better efficiency than any of the AMD GPUs, with the RTX 4080 topping the charts for 1440p gaming. (Note that the fps in the table gives weighting to the 1% low FPS, where the gallery images only use average fps.) The Zotac card gets 0.359 FPS/W, slightly below the 0.367 FPS/W of the Asus 4070 Ti.

The value proposition meanwhile generally favors AMD's previous generation RX 6000-series parts. Again, sticking with 1440p, the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti isn't a great value at 0.102 FPS/$, while the Asus card gets 0.115 FPS/$ thanks to its online price of $820. It's also somewhat fun to note that the much-disparaged RTX 4060 Ti actually gets the best value (of the cards tested for this review) with 0.137 FPS/$. Obviously, there are other factors that could be included rather than this pure mathematical ranking.

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The Zotac RTX 4070 Ti — Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse edition ends up being exactly what you'd expect. The card delivers similar performance to other RTX 4070 Ti models, and you pay a moderately higher price to get the movie-themed extras. If you're not interested in spending nearly $900 on such a card, there are Zotac RTX 4070, 4070 Twin Edge, and RTX 4060 Ti variants with similar bundles.

It should hopefully go without saying, but the magnetic plastic backplate with Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse does absolutely nothing for performance. It might actually make the card run slightly hotter, as the metal backplate won't dissipate heat as well. You can always remove it and have the Amp Airo version, but then why pay for this spruced up package in the first place? And by the way, the backplate kindly notes that the movie is "Exclusively in cinemas" — what happens a few months down the line when it's available on streaming services? Maybe Zotac will send out updated backplates... (Don't count on that!)

We're now five months on from the launch of the Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti. The extras that Zotac includes effectively push this card back into the unlaunched RTX 4080 12GB territory — a price that was deemed so much out of whack that Nvidia actually walked back that release. The 4070 Ti performs good overall, but not really any better than AMD's competing RX 7900 XT. Which represents the better card will depend largely on the games you play and whether you think ray tracing and DLSS are worthwhile additions.

This generation continues to feel like a disappointment for a lot of the models. It's not that performance is worse than the prior generation, and at least the cards are in stock online, but the era of big performance gains and improved values appears to be coming to a close.

We could also point at the 12GB of GDDR6X memory and ask, "Shouldn't Nvidia be able to put 24GB on a $800+ card these days?" After all, spot prices for 8GB of GDDR6 are down to just $27. But that would eat into the professional GPU profits as well as sales of cards for AI workloads.

In so many way, the RTX 40-series feels like a rehash of the RTX 20-series. Prices went up, a lot. Performance has improved, but you have to factor in special features like DLSS 3 Frame Generation, aka frame smoothing. Maybe the RTX 50-series will repeat the 30-series and offer far more attractive MSRPs, and maybe we won't have a massive spike in cryptocurrency prices and mining that makes the MSRPs meaningless. I wouldn't bet on that, however (the pricing, not the mining), and it's likely a lot of people won't really feel enticed to fork over $800 for this level of GPU. 

Depending on your current GPU, the RTX 4070 Ti may still be the best upgrade right now. It delivers performance roughly on par with the previous generation RTX 3090 Ti, though without the additional memory. And it's not like you can find 3090 or 3090 Ti cards for good prices either, as GPU prices for secondhand cards on eBay are equal or higher than the 4070 Ti, plus power draw can be substantially higher as well.

We'll end with where we started. If you absolutely love the new Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse movie, and you're already looking to upgrade to a new high-end graphics card, Zotac is ready to take your money. If you're not particularly concerned with the movie or $800 graphics cards, you can safely give this a pass.

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It appears that Nvidia plans to introduce its cheapest Ada Lovelace-based graphics cards — the GeForce RTX 4060 with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory onboard — on June 29, 2023, according to reputable leaker MEGAsizeGPU that tends to be accurate when it comes to Nvidia's launch plans. However, as this information is from a leak, consider it cautiously and with the required amount of salt.

Based on a document published by the leaker, Nvidia and its add-in-board (AIB) partners will ship GeForce RTX 4060 products to the channel on June 12, so the cards will be in stock shortly. Nvidia wants reviews of graphics cards carrying a $299 MSRP to be published in June 28 and reviews of boards with a non-MSRP price tag to be released on June 29. On the same day, the product, which has all chances to become one of the best graphics cards available this summer, will be on the shelves.

The GeForce RTX 4060 is expected to use the AD106 GPU, which comes with 3072 CUDA cores, and is paired with 8GB of 17 GT/s GDDR6 memory via a 128-bit interface. This new AIB comes with a GPU that features notably fewer active CUDA cores compared to the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, which has 4352 CUDA cores, indicating a significant disparity in performance between the two. However, the power consumption of the RTX 4060 model is estimated to be up to 115W, which is considerably lower than that of the RTX 4060 Ti model.

The relatively low power consumption will enable makers of graphics cards to experiment designs for both the printed circuit board as well as cooling system. Therefore, expect both compact GeForce RTX 4060 boards with single-slot coolers or with low-profile PCB as well as cards featuring large cooling systems that will promise extended overclocking capability.

It is noteworthy that the document published by @Zed_Wang also notes the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB, which is potentially a very interesting graphics card for gamers, but only indicates that this will be available in July without clarifying the date.

Keep in mind that while the leaker is reputable and tends to have actual documents, plans can change and this is still an unofficial source. That said, take the information with a grain of salt.

Inno3D has thought of a way to hide the power connectors on the brand’s upcoming GeForce RTX 4070 and GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, two of the best graphics cards on the market. Unlike Asus’ concept of ditching the power connectors, Inno3D ingeniously placed them at the back of the graphics card.

Inno3D is preparing to launch the GeForce RTX 4070 AX eSports and the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti iChill X2 White in the Chinese market. Consumers will surely like the idea of having the power cables routed to the back of the graphics card since it would facilitate cable management and improve the overall aesthetics of the build.

The power connectors reside on the back of the PCB, located in an área between the heatsink and backplate. Inno3D rotated the power connector in a 180-degree orientation so it faces the motherboard instead of the side panel of your case. The good news is that the graphics card only requires a single power cable, so consumers don’t have to worry about routing multiple cables.

In Inno3D’s case, the two upcoming graphics cards leverage a standard 8-pin PCIe power connector. However, we can see the utility of the design for models that use the 16-pin power connector. With all the cases of the 16-pin power connector meltdowns, consumers are paying extra attention when connecting and vending the cable. Inno3D’s design offers ample clearance space for bending the cable, and consumers can discard the power adapter, assuming they have an ATX 3.0-compliant power supply. 

Although both graphics cards have hidden power connectors, they differ slightly in implementation. The GeForce RTX 4070 AX eSports comes with a partially-removable backplate. Users can lift one-half of the backplate to reveal the 8-pin PCIe power connector. On the other hand, the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti iChill X2 White isn’t as long as the GeForce RTX 4070 AX eSports, so there was no way for Inno3D to use the same design. Nonetheless, consumers won’t have to remove the entire backplate to access the power connector. Instead, the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti iChill X2 White features a sizeable cutout where you can plug in the same 8-pin PCIe power cable.

According to MyDrivers, the GeForce RTX 4070 AX eSports and the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti iChill X2 White will have bundled white power cables to match the graphics cards’ white theme. Inno3D didn’t share the availability or pricing for the graphics cards yet.

Benchmarks of the Apple M2 Ultra's GPU appear to have leaked online. Today, we spotted various social media posts sharing Geekbench GPU compute scores and GFXBench Aztec Ruins scores. On the surface, these results seem to show that the GPU in the new M2 Ultra is highly formidable, offering GPU compute performance somewhere between a GeForce RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4080. But we need to step back a bit and explain precisely what it is we're looking at.

We reported upon the new Apple M2 Ultra SoC reveal during the firm's annual WWDC earlier in the week. The chip will arrive in updated Mac Studio and Mac Pro designs, which are scheduled to ship next week. However, someone appears to be testing these new Mac computers/processors before consumers can get hold of them, as a raft of benchmarks has appeared online recently.

Yesterday, we picked through a selection of Apple M2 Ultra benchmarks, focusing on the SoC's CPU core performance. Today, we will look more closely at the potential compute capabilities of the M2 Ultra's GPU, thanks to the Geekbench and GFXbench leaks mentioned in the intro.

M2 Ultra Geekbench 6 Compute Benchmarks

It looks like several pre-release M2 Ultra Apple Mac system users have run Geekbench 6's Metal and OpenCL GPU benchmarks. Apple's Metal API is a proprietary graphics API developed by the firm for fast 'direct to the metal' hardware addressing, like an Apple optimized parallel to Microsoft's DirectX.

While these are very interesting synthetic compute benchmarks, we look forward to some thorough real-world testing of the new Apple Macs with M2 Ultra processors, shortly, particularly in gaming, which has been a pain point for Apple's chips.

Note that GPU compute tends to scale far better with multi-chip approaches than GPU graphics — think about Ethereum mining back in the day, where you could connect eight (or more) GPUs to a single modest CPU via PCIe x1 connections and they would all mine at basically 100% of their maximum performance. Not all compute workloads scale that well, but it's still very different than the scaling traditionally seen with real-time graphics used in games.

The new M2 Ultra chip's GPU, featuring up to 76 integrated graphics cores, looks impressive compared to the previous gen M1 Ultra with its maximum 64 graphics cores. In a direct comparison using Geekbench 6, the new-gen M2 Ultra scores about 220,000 or thereabouts, compared to about 155,000 on average for the M1 Ultra.

By this metric, M2 Ultra is over 40% faster than its predecessor in GPU compute tasks. It only has around 10% more graphics cores, so Apple has done well to achieve this scale of uplift.

Turning to a different comparison, the new Apple M2 Ultra's 220,000 Geekbench 6 Compute scores (Metal) sit between the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti (208,340 OpenCL) and RTX 4080 (245,706 OpenCL). For a direct Geekbench 6 OpenCL comparison, the Apple M2 Ultra Open CL scores of about 155,000 are much closer to PC GPUs like the Nvidia RTX A5000 and AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT.

Again, we need to note that Geekbench 6 OpenCL compute performance does not usually translate well to actual gaming workloads. Synthetic Geekbench 6 performance is very different from real-world graphics.

M2 Ultra GFXBench Benchmarks

Another user has put their M2 Ultra-powered Apple Mac through the GFXBench test suite. In the 4K Aztec Ruins offscreen tests, the new Apple SoC is over 55% faster than its predecessor. This seems to be an even better result than the Geekbench 6 GPU compute comparison. Theoretically, it should also give a better indication of 3D accelerations / gaming performance uplifts, since this is a graphics workload rather than compute.

However, GFXBench is not an ideal desktop GPU comparison tool as it doesn't usually scale well with the highest-end graphics hardware. The Aztec Ruins benchmark is more appropriate to smartphone SoCs than to GPUs like RTX 4070 Ti. Furthermore, we need to focus on the GFXBench "offscreen" tests, which assesses the rendering power of the GPU without worrying about the display resolution in use. Considering the entire benchmark suite weighs in at less than 1GB, it's a safe bet that it's not very representative of modern games that can total more than 100GB.

The screenshot above shows that the Apple M2 Ultra can achieve nearly 315 FPS in the 4K Aztec Ruins high-tier offscreen test (Metal API). Above, we mentioned that this score is over 55% faster than the M1 Ultra. A comparable score on the PC platform would again be something between the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4080 (DX12 API).

Big spoonfuls of salt are required here. Ideally, we need to see performance in games and other graphics and compute applications rather than these synthetic workloads that may not be representative of anything truly useful. We look forward to seeing some thorough real-world testing of the new Apple Macs with M2 Ultra processors, which should be available next week.

PNY had some of the best graphics cards on showcase at Computex 2023. The manufacturer even brought some workstation graphics cards, including the RTX 6000 Ada Generation and the RTX 4000 SFF. However, two particular graphics cards caught our attention.

First off, PNY has partnered with Cooler Master to produce the GeForce RTX 4090 Verto. It has become a trend for graphics card manufacturers to pair up with cooling specialists to create innovative products. For example, Asus taps into Noctua's experience and expertise to make the GeForce RTX 4080 16GB GDDR6X Noctua OC Edition.

If you think you've seen some thick GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards, think again. For example, the GeForce RTX 4090 Verto is a 4.5-slot graphics card, which is insane because it covers almost all the PCI slots from your typical mATX case. For comparison, Asus' custom GeForce RTX 4080 with Noctua features a 4.3-slot design. The dimensions for the GeForce RTX 4090 Verto are 12.2 x 5.6 x 3.5 inches (310 x 142 x 89mm), so it's comparable to Asus' offering, which measures 12.2 x 5.7 x 3.5 inches (310 x 144.8 x 87.5mm). In PNY's case, Cooler Master designed the cooler, while PNY took care of everything underneath the shroud.

Not much is known about the GeForce RTX 4090 Verto. PNY didn't reveal the clock speeds for the GeForce RTX 4090 Verto. The shroud is a prototype, so that the retail version may look slightly different. The graphics card utilizes a dual-fan cooling solution and appears to feature a pair of Cooler Master's Mobius 120P ARGB 30th Anniversary Edition 120mm fans. The prototype has the cooling fans connected to the PWM fan connectors on the motherboard. It draws power from a standard 16-pin (12VHPWR) power connector and offers an HDMI 2.1 port and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs.

There aren't many blower-type GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards on the market. Thus far, we only know about two Ada Lovelace models that sport a blower design. In addition, Leadtek sells the WinFast RTX 4070 AI Blower 12G and the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti 12GB Hyper Brain, a China-exclusive SKU. Unfortunately, pickings are incredibly slim regarding blower graphics cards, and while Leadtek is a globally renowned brand, its products aren't widely available in the U.S. market. Therefore, PNY has an excellent opportunity for success with the GeForce RTX 4070 Blower Edition.

The GeForce RTX 4070 Blower Edition comes in a standard dual-slot format with dimensions of 11 x 4.7 x 1.6 inches (278.4 x 119.4 x 40mm), so it's a good fit inside small form factor (SFF) cases and workstations where you have multiple GeForce RTX 4070 Blower Edition graphics cards. The blower design is perfect for expelling heat outside the case instead of standard graphics card coolers. The GeForce RTX 4070 Blower Edition employs an 82mm fan for active cooling. Again, PNY didn't share the clock speeds for the graphics card.

MSI has a diverse offering of custom GeForce RTX 4070 Ti cards, which are among the best graphics cards currently around. The vendor's portfolio consists of nothing less than four different models, eight if you count the overclocked variants too. However, for Computex 2023, MSI prepared a new model to round out the brand's already comprehensive lineup.

The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming X Slim 12G is essentially a cut-down version of the  GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming X Trio 12G. It features a slightly revamped shroud but sticks to MSI's Tri Frozr 3 cooling system. MSI told Tom's Hardware Deputy Managing Editor Paul Alcorn that an RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 will come later.

As the model name insinuates, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming X Slim 12G flaunts a more svelte profile than MSI's other GeForce RTX 4070 Ti graphics cards. That doesn't mean the graphics card is tiny enough to fit inside small form factor (SFF) systems, though. Nonetheless, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming X Slim 12G comes in a what MSI calls a 2.2-slot design, coming in a smidge over two slots. Still it should help with cable management, especially since you must be careful when bending the 16-pin power cable.

There's a brand new cooler on board, with new fans. The trio Torx 5.0 cooling fans are tilted together at a 22-degree angle to provide high pressure even at slower fan speeds. According to MSI, this unique design improves airflow by up to 23% compared to an average axial cooling fan. However, without a product page to work with, it's uncertain if MSI made any changes under the hood that would affect the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming X Slim 12G's thermal dissipation performance.

Aesthetically, the claw marks on the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming X Slim 12G are in the opposite direction compared to the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming X Trio 12G. There's some RGB, which comes in the shape of the MSI logo on the side of the graphics card. In addition, as with any high-end offering, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming X Slim has a matching metal backplate to help improve the structural support and cooling performance of the components on the rear of the graphics card.

The graphics card draws power from a single 16-pin power connector. It also provides the same display outputs, which arrive in the shape of three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs and one HDMI 2.1a port.

We don't know whether the graphics card will be available at U.S. retailers, nor how it might be priced. The graphics card slots between the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming X Trio 12G and GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Ventus 3X 12G OC. In a perfect world, the price tag should be within the range of those two models, which retail for $869 and $814, respectively.

Grab a pre-built gaming PC with an RTX 4070 Ti and Intel Core i5-13600K and save $400 with this deal on the Skytech Azure Gaming PC that's now only $1,799 at Newegg. If you're not comfortable with building your own PC, then a pre-configured system like the Skytech Azure is a great option. 

If you're on the hunt for a cheaper, more budget-oriented PC then consider the Acer Nitro 50 gaming PC for only $749 at Newegg. This pre-built rig contains an Intel Core i5 12th Gen 12400F CPU and RTX 3050 graphics card.

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See below for more Real Deals. 

TL;DR — Today’s Best Deals

• Skytech Azure Gaming PC: now $1,799 at Newegg (was $2,199)
• Acer Nitro 50 Gaming Desktop: now $749 at Newegg (was $1,199)
• Phrozen Sonic Mini 8K LCD Resin 3D Printer: now $399 at Amazon v(was $599)
• AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU: now $289 at Amazon  (was $449)
• KYY 15.6inch 1080P FHD USB-C Monitor: now $119 at Amazon (was $219)

Today’s best deals in detail

Looking for more deals?

Asus is working on a concept design for GeForce RTX 40-series (Ada Lovelace) graphics cards that don’t require any power connectors for external power. Instead, the vendor has designed a proprietary slot that delivers up to 600W of power on a custom Z790 motherboard with back-facing connections. We saw the demo at an Asus briefing this week 

The 16-pin power connector (12VHPWR) made many headlines last year because the power adapter melted on a few GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards. Unfortunately, the issue is ongoing, as new cases of the 16-pin meltdowns surfaced a week ago. Nvidia attributed the problem to user error because the 16-pin power connector wasn’t correctly installed in some scenarios. 

Asus’ design doesn’t completely remove the user factor from the equation. Still, it does help minimize the possibility of occurrence since the 16-pin power connector isn’t on the graphics card anymore but on the motherboard, where there is more liberty to maneuver the power cable.

The GeForce RTX 4070 Megalodon is the first prototype to feature a connector-less design. However, the branding isn’t final yet so the retail product may have another name. At first glance, the GeForce RTX 4070 Megalodon looks like a regular 2.3-slot graphics card. 

However, upon closer inspection, you’ll notice that there aren’t any PCIe power connectors. In their place, Asus implemented a proprietary connector that resembles a PCIe x1 connector. However, it has the same power delivery as the 16-pin power connector, up to 600W. Asus has baptized the connector as “GC_HPWR” for now, but the company said it’d have an official name at launch.

Asus isn't the first vendor to slap a custom connector on the graphics card to provide power. For example, AMD has produced some Radeon Pro graphics cards for Apple that use the latter’s MPX (Mac Pro eXpansion) form factor. However, Asus’ custom power connector, which doesn’t have an official name yet, isn’t as long as Apple’s implementation.

Asus demonstrated the GeForce RTX 4070 Megalodon alongside a TUF Gaming Z790 BTF, a motherboard with connectors on the back. It's a design based on the DIY-APE standard. The GC_HPWR connector on the motherboard essentially acts as a pass-through for the 16-pin power connector because the power has to come from somewhere.

However, Asus also went the extra mile and added three 8-pin PCIe power connectors to the mix. Therefore, consumers may choose the three-cable solution or the single 16-pin alternative. Even though the motherboard has the special GC_HPWR connector, it doesn't limit its usage. Consumers can use regular graphics cards on Asus' motherboard.

Asus' BTF motherboards were previously restricted to the Chinese market. However, the company said that the TUF Gaming Z790 BTF and the GeForce RTX 4070 Megalodon would hit the global markets. Pricing is unknown, but Asus confirmed that they would carry a slight premium since there's the added cost of moving the connectors to the back of the motherboard. Not to mention that consumers will also have to shell out more money for a case designed for Asus' BTF motherboards.

In the meantime, the GeForce RTX 4070 Megalodon is kept inside Asus' ecosystem. Unfortunately, the brand didn't state whether it'll open the proprietary design to other motherboard vendors. But more importantly, will other manufacturers be willing to jump on the new design since it'll involve additional cost and human resources to redesign existing motherboards and graphics cards to meet the standard? Then there's the existent risk that the design doesn't take off.

A new listing from the National Radio Research Agency in Korea confirms that an Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics card with blower-style cooling might be in the works by GPU manufacturer Leadtek. The intended role of this GPU would be professional use — not gaming — with a focus on AI-intensive workloads. 

We know basically nothing about this new GPU — all we know is the model name from the listing, which reads "RTX 4070 AI BLOWER," as well as the manufacturer (Leadtek). But even with this limited information, it's clear this card is not aimed at gamers, but is designed specifically for the server/workstation market. If it comes out, it will be a very attractive professional SKU with 16GB of memory and (probably) a 200W TGP. 

Blower-style coolers have become exceedingly rare in the consumer space since Nvidia shifted the cooler designs for its Founders Edition cards from vapor chamber blower-style coolers to standard dual-fan coolers, starting with the RTX 20 series. Since then, Nvidia has become incredibly opposed to AIB partners using blower-style coolers in the brand's mainstream GeForce-branded gaming graphics cards. 

We suspect one reason Nvidia changed its position on blower-style coolers is to prevent competition between its consumer GeForce GPUs and its professional Quadro/A-series graphics cards. Nvidia's professional GPUs are built almost entirely with blower-style coolers in order to squeeze as many GPUs as possible into a single workstation/server chassis. The problem is that Nvidia's Quadro and A-series GPUs are much more expensive than their GeForce counterparts, meaning any high-performing GeForce card with blower-style cooling would bring in far less profit than a professional GPU. 

Nvidia banned AIB partners from making RTX 3090 blower-style cards back in 2021. At the time, several partners had blower-style RTX 3090 cards on the market, and many of them were being used by system builders, such as Puget Systems, to build multi-GPU RTX 3090 workstations. Unfortunately Nvidia caught wind of the workaround and decided to ban the practice altogether — though the company didn't ban RTX 3080 or RTX 3070 blower-style cards, just the RTX 3090 versions.

The strange part of this story is that Nvidia never officially banned high-end blower-style coolers after that, from what we can tell. We saw an RTX 4090 blower-style card several months ago, which looked like a pre-production sample that was basically production-ready. But we have not seen any blower-style RTX 40 series GPUs hit the mainstream market so far, so who know what happened to it. 

With the possibility of an RTX 4070 blower-style card coming to the market, it raises the question: why are Nvidia's partners risking their R&D budget on products that will almost certainly be banned by Nvidia? We don't know the answer, but perhaps some of these manufacturers are going forward with prototype designs and hoping that one day Nvidia will greenlight production. This is more likely to be the case for the RTX 4070, since Nvidia technically only banned RTX xx90 blower-style GPUs, not the lower cards. 

Key specification of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 Ti graphics card have seemingly been leaked via a new entry in the Geekbench 5 database (via @BenchLeaks). While we cannot be 100% sure that the card tested in the benchmark featured is the final configuration of the GPU, the probability is quite high at this point. For now, take a healthy pinch of salt with the news.

*Rumored specs, not confirmed by Nvidia

Based on the database entry, Nvidia's alleged GeForce RTX 4060 Ti features 34 streaming multiprocessors, which in case of the Ada Lovelace architecture means 4352 CUDA cores. The maximum GPU clock is said to be 2.54 GHz, though keep in mind that there will be other cards with different processor speeds. Also, the card allegedly carries 8GB of GDDR6 memory with an 18 GT/s data transfer rate, which is in line with previous leaks. 

Speaking of performance in Geekbench 5, the alleged GeForce RTX 4060 Ti graphics card scored 146,170 points, which is higher compared to around 130,000 points scored by GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. The latter is among the best graphics cards currently available, so at least the newcomer is ahead of its predecessor albeit by a small margin. Meanwhile, performance in real games is substantially different from performance in compute applications, such as Geekbench 5 CUDA test.

If unofficial information is to be believed, Nvidia is set to introduce its GeForce RTX 4060 Ti graphics cards later this month. If this is the case, then Nvidia's partners among add-in-board makers already have GeForce RTX 4060 Ti products at hand, and retailers will soon have those AIBs in stock. To that end, it is inevitable that at least some of them will test these devices in popular benchmarks leaking their performance and revealing their specifications. 

While specifications of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 have been most probably finalized, since we are dealing with unofficial information, use it with discretion as some last minute details can still change.

I recently bought an Nvidia RTX 4070 Founders Edition, upgrading from an RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition  which was great for 1080p gaming, but started to creak at 1440p. I had to turn down the settings to play Cyberpunk 2077, The Ascent and even Forza Horizon 5.

The Nvidia RTX 4070 seemed like the best GPU for me. It is a mid-range card that would work well with my AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU and 32GB of DDR4 RAM. Installation was a breeze, drivers updated and I launched Cyberpunk 2077. I went into Settings >> Graphics and expected Frame Generation to be ready, but it was grayed out.

I’m running Windows 10 22H2 and unbeknownst to me, hardware accelerated GPU scheduling was not enabled. In Windows 11 it is enabled by default, perhaps another means to encourage users to upgrade? 

What is Optical Multi Frame Generation?

Optical Multi Frame Generation was introduced in DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and generates frames using AI to analyze “two sequential in-game images and calculates motion vector data for objects and elements that appear in the frame” The frames are fed into a neural network along with engine and optical flow motion vectors to produce a combined DLSS-generated, with DLSS 3 said to boost frame rates by up to 4x when compared to non DLSS methods.

In our non-scientific test (our GPU Editor Jarred Waltonhas all the in-depth technical data on the RTX 4070) we went from 45fps to 75fps with frame generation, an impressive boost given the mid-range spec of our build.

Update Your Drivers and Games

Before you start the process, ensure that you are running the latest drivers for your Nvidia RTX 40 series card, and that your games are updated. For my test I used Cyberpunk 2077, which recently saw a ray tracing overdrive update and I set this as my target.

How To Enable Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling

Introduced in Windows 10 May 2020 update, hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling enables Windows to offload most of the GPU scheduling tasks to a dedicated GPU-based scheduling processor. In Windows 10 we need to enable this feature, Windows 11 automatically enables hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling.

1. Navigate to the Graphics settings menu. You can get there by searching for Graphics in Windows and clicking on Graphics Settings.

2. Toggle on Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling. 

3. Reboot your PC.

Using DLSS 3.0 Frame Generation

1. In your game, go to the Graphics menu in settings.

2. Click on DLSS Frame Generation.

3. Start your game.

Enjoy your smoother gameplay. 

Nvidia is reportedly readying a yet another GeForce RTX 4060 model, the non-Ti RTX 4060 with 16GB of memory. The new GeForce RTX 4060 variant will reportedly feature a slightly higher power rating than the variant with 8GB of memory, reports VideoCardz.

Earlier this week it transpired (albeit from an unofficial source) that Nvidia was prepping three GeForce RTX 4060 models: the GeForce RTX 4060 8GB, GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB, and GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB. But it now looks like there will be the fourth model too: the GeForce RTX 4060 with 16GB of memory, if the information is accurate. All four potential SKUs are certain candidates to join the ranks of the best graphics cards 

The interesting part is that VideoCardz clams that the GeForce RTX 4060 16GB will feature the AD106-351 graphics processor. Meanwhile the GeForce RTX 4060 8GB is expected to use the AD106-350, so a slightly different variant. Both will likely feature 3072 CUDA cores and a 128-bit memory interface, so the difference between the two is unclear. 

Another interesting peculiarity of the GeForce RTX 4060 16GB noted by VideoCardz is the fact that the 16GB card will be rated for a 165W TGP, as opposed to 160W for the 8GB version.

While it is unclear why the GeForce RTX 4060 16GB has a higher TGP rating and carries a differently market GPU, the very fact that Nvidia is reportedly prepping a GeForce RTX 4060 (non-Ti) model with 16GB of memory is important and pretty much remarkable. 

*Rumored specs, not confirmed by Nvidia

What remains to be seen is how Nvidia positions its GeForce RTX 4060 16GB variant. It is reasonable to expect this model to sit above the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB (which is projected to hit the market this month), but we can only wonder how this SKU will stack against the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB. 

 If the two variants are close in terms of price, then gamers will have to make their choice based on whether their favorite games need 16GB of memory, or a higher-performing GPU with 4352 CUDA cores. Or perhaps go with more expensive GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB or even GeForce RTX 4070 with 12GB.

Today at Lenovo, users can take home the Legion Pro 5 Gen 8 AMD RTX 4070 gaming laptop for one of its best prices yet. This top-of-the-line gaming laptop usually costs around $1,900, but right now is marked down to $1,600. However, it’s unclear how long this discount will be made available as no expiration is specified for the offer.

Under the hood of this edition of the Legion Pro 5 is an AMD Ryzen 7 7745HX processor. This CPU has a base speed of 3.6 GHz and can reach up to 5.10 GHz with max boost enabled. Memory-wise, it comes with 32 GB of DDR5-5200 via two 16 GB modules.

It uses an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card that outputs to a 16-inch IPS panel. The resolution caps out at 2560 x 1600 and is illuminated with a brightness of 300 nits. The refresh rate can get as high as 165 Hz.

Storage-wise, the Legion Pro 5 Gen 8 AMD RTX 4070 gaming laptop uses a 1TB M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 SSD. It has an integrated microphone and camera with a resolution of 1080p FHD. In addition, there are a few ports to take advantage of around the edges, including four USB Type-A ports, two USB Type-C ports, an Ethernet port for hardwired network connections, and an HDMI port for video output.

Visit the Legion Pro 5 Gen 8 AMD RTX 4070 gaming laptop product page at Lenovo for more details and to get a closer look at this offer. But, again, we’re unsure how long the discount will be offered.

Rumors about Nvidia's plans to formally introduce its GeForce RTX 4060-series graphics cards in May have been floating around for a while, but it was unclear when these add-in-boards (AIBs) are set to hit the market. A new leak contends that Nvidia wants its partners to start selling GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB model on May 24, 2023, reports VideoCardz, citing a source with knowledge of the matter. As with all leaks, take this with a grain of salt. 

Nvidia purportedly intends to formally unveil three of its Ada Lovelace-based GeForce RTX 4060-series models — GeForce RTX 4060, GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB, and GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB, which are certainly candidates to join the ranks of the best graphics cards — sometime in mid-May, though it is unclear whether the company will let the press publish reviews of all for SKUs, or will limit the info to just the specifications. 

Meanwhile, only the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB will hit the market on May 24, 2023, based on information from VideoCardz. The website contends that the product will emerge on store shelves just a day before AMD is expected to lift the embargo from Radeon RX 7600 reviews, which will certainly steal some thunder from Team Red's introduction.

Meanwhile, the vanilla GeForce RTX 4060 8GB will be available in the first half of July. In contrast, if the information is correct, the more expensive GeForce RTX 4060 16GB will hit the market in the second half of July, more than two months after the formal announcement.

*Rumored specs, not confirmed by Nvidia

This purported launch schedule will enable Nvidia and its partners to sell GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB at a premium and avoid any kind of competition between the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB and GeForce RTX 4070 12GB. As a result, those gamers who plan to buy an Nvidia performance mainstream graphics card in May – July but are unwilling to invest in a GeForce RTX 4070 will be left with only one choice if they want an Ada Lovelace AIB.

Nvidia still has not disclosed its GeForce RTX 4060 launch plans so far, so take the unofficial information with a grain of salt and remember that all plans tend to change.

It didn't take long for the GeForce RTX 4070 to position itself as one of the best graphics cards for gamers. However, according to new information from kopite7kimi, one of the more credible leakers in the hardware scene, a second variant of the GeForce RTX 4070 may already be in the pipeline.

Chipmakers have been salvaging silicon for ages, and rightfully so nowadays since wafer prices aren't getting any cheaper. Take the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, initially launched with the GA104 silicon. Nvidia would later recycle defective GA102 silicon and slip them into the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. However, the die-swap occurred a little over a year after the graphics card's launch. The GeForce RTX 4070 just came out last month, so it seems a bit early for Nvidia to put out a second variant.

Currently, there are two theories. The more obvious says Nvidia is just salvaging dies due to pricey wafers — what else can it do with AD103 chips where one of the memory controllers doesn't work? The other rumor claims that switching to the new die could pave the way for a GeForce RTX 4070 with 16GB of memory.

The GeForce RTX 4070 currently utilizes the AD104 silicon that houses 60 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), but only 46 are enabled on the graphics card. The current rumor is that Nvidia may repurpose the AD103 silicon for the GeForce RTX 4070. The AD103 silicon, which powers the GeForce RTX 4080, is bigger than the AD104 die, so it's a more than adequate substitute. The GeForce RTX 4070 only has 5,888 CUDA cores, meaning a GeForce RTX 4070 AD103 would have slightly more than half of the SMs disabled.

Nvidia has received much criticism, including from AMD, for only incorporating 12GB of memory on the GeForce RTX 4070. AMD gloated that its Radeon 16GB graphics cards start from $479 (now), while consumers don't get the same amount of memory on the latest GeForce RTX 40-series graphics card until they hit the GeForce RTX 4080 tier, which starts at $1,199. This could fuel Nvidia to release a GeForce RTX 4070 16GB. Gigabyte had previously listed a GeForce RTX 4070 16GB on its website, lending some credence to the theory.

Gamers would probably like to see a GeForce RTX 4070 16GB with the increasing VRAM requirements from modern triple-A games. However, at least at this point, it's unlikely that one will launch. Releasing a 16GB model this early would only anger early GeForce RTX 4070 adopters — and let's not forget the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, which also has 12GB. The regular GeForce RTX 4070, at $599, is already hard to swallow, and adding more memory would only push the MSRP even higher. Although that wouldn't be a severe issue with the GeForce RTX 40-series product stack since every SKU so far carries a premium price tag.

According to a reliable source, Nvidia will allegedly announce the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti this month. We've only seen retailer listings for an 8GB model; however, a 16GB variant is reportedly launching too. The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB, seemingly hitting the retail market in July, will be the cheapest Ada Lovelace SKU with 16GB that gamers can purchase. Nvidia could use clamshell mode on the VRAM and just put memory on both sides of the PCB as well, which would allow for 16GB with only a 128-bit interface.

We'll have to wait to find out more about the RTX 4060 Ti and whether or not a 4070 16GB model is forthcoming. We fully expect to see an 8GB 4060 Ti, and the RTX 3060 also launched with a 12GB model even though the RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, and RTX 3070 Ti were all limited to just 8GB. So it's not out of the question for a lower tier part to be available with more VRAM than higher tier parts.

Nvidia is rumored to announce three GeForce RTX 4060-series graphics cards this month, but only one of them is said to be available in May, whereas others will purportedly hit the market in July, according to renowned hardware leaker @MegaSizeGPU, who has been accurate in the past when it comes to Nvidia's launch plans. The leader says that Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 lineup will include graphics cards with 8GB and 16GB of memory.

Later this month, Nvidia is rumored to introduce three Ada Lovelace-based GeForce RTX 4060-series graphics cards aimed at the mainstream and performance-mainstream market segments. The lineup will purportedly include the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti with 8GB of GDDR6 SGRAM, the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti with 16GB of memory, and the GeForce RTX 4060 with 8GB of GDDR6 memory. However, only the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB is expected to hit the market this month. According to the leaker, the more expensive and cheaper models will be available only in July.

*Rumored specs, not confirmed by Nvidia

At this point, it is unclear whether Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB and 16GB will rely on the AD104 graphics processor in the same configuration with 4352 CUDA cores, but this is certainly a likely scenario. Based on previous leaks, Nvidia wants its RTX 4060 Ti to consume no more than 160W, which will enable GPU makers to build compact yet rather powerful performance-mainstream boards and therefore address both standard and compact desktops.

As for the vanilla GeForce RTX 4060, it will feature AD106 with 3072 CUDA cores and will therefore consume even less power, so expect low-profile and perhaps even single-slot graphics cards based on this GPU.

As of now, it does not look like Nvidia has a firm launch date for its new products. The green company might formally introduce its GeForce RTX 4060 family later this month, and perhaps it will use the company's chief executive Jensen Huang's keynote at Computex 2023 trade show on May 29 to do so. Yet, in this case it means that the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB will be on sale for just a couple of days this month. 

Anyhow, since the information comes from an unofficial (yet credible) source, take it with a grain of salt since even if it represents current plans, intentions tend to change.