Colorful Unveils Liquid-Cooled GeForce RTX 4070
But it comes at a price.
One of the world's largest supplier of graphics cards, Colorful is no stranger to offering exclusive products. This week the company quietly rolled out the world's only GeForce RTX 4070 with a closed-loop cooling system. The graphics board promises to provide the ultimate overclocking experience, but its price may be too high for many to justify it..
Colorful's iGame GeForce RTX 4070 Neptune OC-V relies on Nvidia's AD104-250 graphics processor with 5,888 CUDA cores mated with 12GB of GDDR6X memory using a 192-bit interface, but uses a proprietary printed circuit board with a 14+3-phase power delivery to maximize GPU overclocking potential. The board comes with a one-key overclocking function enabling up to 2640 MHz boost clock, up from 2,475 MHz by default. The board uses a 12+4-pin 12VHPWR auxiliary PCIe 5.0 power connector and is rated for a TDP of up to 230W, which is 30W higher than that of Nvidia's reference design.
The key selling point of the iGame GeForce RTX 4070 Neptune OC-V is of course its closed-loop liquid cooling system that promises to provide superior cooling performance while allowing to make the board itself a bit more compact. While the card is still two slots wide, it's just 253.5 mm long, which is not too lengthy by today's standards. However, you'll have to fit a 277 mm radiator with two fans somewhere in the chassis too. With an enhanced VRM and LCS, overclocking potential of Colorful's GeForce RTX 4080 Neptune promises to be significant, something that will put it in the list of the best graphics cards.
As the only liquid-cooled GeForce RTX 4070, the iGame GeForce RTX 4070 Neptune OC-V is expensive. VideoCardz claims that Colorful will charge $829 for it, but it is unclear whether this will be the price for the U.S. (which does not include taxes) or for China or Europe. Either way, it is considerably more expensive than Nvidia's MSRP for GeForce RTX 4070 and approaches or exceeds recommended price of the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, which means that the new product will have to deliver performance on par with the higher-end part.
Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 is powered by the AD104-250 GPU with 5.888 CUDA cores, offers a compute throughput of up to 29.15 FP32 TFLOPS, and has an MSRP of $599. By contrast, Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is based on the AD104-400 GPU with 7,680 CUDA cores offers up to 40 FP32 TFLOPS, but comes with an MSRP of $799.
In a bid to compensate for the lack of 1,792 CUDA cores and offer similar compute throughput as its Ti sibling, the vanilla GeForce RTX 4070 will have to work at around 3.40 GHz, which is about 925 MHz higher than the Nvidia-recommended boost clock for the RTX 4070 model. While we are sure that at least some AD104-250 GPUs are great overclockers, we are not sure that all of them can hit 3.40 GHz at 230W and offer performance like the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti with the AD104-400.
Of course, a liquid cooling system may provide better cooling than an air cooler, which increases its value even if it cannot approach performance of GeForce RTX 4070 Ti to justify its high price. Whether or not a longer lifespan alone justifies higher price is something that remains to be seen though.
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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.