Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Nvidia RTX 5070 Founders Edition: Power, Clocks, Temps, and Noise
All our gaming tests are conducted using an Nvidia PCAT v2 device, which allows us to capture total graphics card power, GPU clocks, GPU temperatures, and some other data as we run each gaming benchmark. We have separate 1080p, 1440p, and 4K results for each area, which we'll order from highest to lowest resolution for these tests.
Nvidia gives the RTX 5070 Founders Edition a 250W TGP, though factory overclocked 5070 cards will likely push that higher. On average, it used 242W at 4K, about 20% more than the RTX 4070 and basically showing linear scaling with performance. The power use does drop at lower resolutions and settings, but it's always still at least 20W higher than its predecessor. This shouldn't be too surprising, as Nvidia didn't change process nodes so overall it gets pretty similar efficiency out of Blackwell.
Clock speeds among the different GPUs and architectures aren't super important, but it's interesting to see where things land. The official boost clock on the RTX 5070 Ti is 2512 MHz, but as we've seen with other Nvidia GPUs, the cards generally exceed the rated boost clock by a decent margin. In this case, the 5070 Founders Edition averages more than 300 MHz higher at 1080p and 1440p, and about 290 MHz more at 4K. Only the 5070 Ti and 4070 Ti clock slightly higher, and not by enough to worry about.
Like the clock speeds, comparing GPU temperatures without considering other aspects of the cards doesn't make much sense. One card might run its fans at higher RPMs, generating more noise while being "cooler." So these graphs should be used alongside the noise and performance results.
With a relatively compact card and a 250W TGP, the RTX 5070 Founders Edition ends up being one of the hottest running GPUs in recent history. That's not saying much, however, as it still running below 80C in all of our tests, averaging 74C or less across the full suite. It's basically tied with AMD's RX 7800 XT reference card at 4K, but does better at lower resolutions and settings where it's able to curtain power use.
But we also need to look at 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 one fan: the center fan if there are three fans, or the right fan for two fans. This helps minimize the impact of other noise sources, like the fans on the CPU cooler. The new noise floor of our test environment and equipment is around 34 dB(A), due to the noise from the CPU cooling pump.
The RTX 5070 Founders Edition ends up being the loudest card out of our test collection, hitting 50 dB(A) during our Cyberpunk 2077 stress test. It's only slightly louder than a few of the other GPUs, but overall it's clearly not a silent design by any stretch. Even AMD's similar power RX 7800 XT proves to be far superior when it comes to noise levels, and a lot of AIB cards do much better than the reference designs.
Here's the full table of testing results, with FPS/$ calculated using the various launch MSRPs for the cards. That's because current retail prices are all wildly inflated, and many of the previous generation GPUs are now discontinued. We can only hope prices on the latest generation cards actually manage to reach MSRPs at some point. (Wishful thinking, perhaps.) Latency results are included for some of the games as well, and you can see the game-by-game power figures.
- MORE: Best Graphics Cards
- MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
- MORE: All Graphics Content
