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Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Design, Featuring Asus TUF Gaming OC
Unlike the 4080 and 4090 Founders Editions, Nvidia isn't making its own RTX 4070 Ti. That's an interesting development, as Nvidia has had Founders Editions of everything from GTX 1060 6GB through 1080 Ti (five models), RTX 2060 through 2080 Ti (seven models), and RTX 3060 Ti through 3090 (six models). Now, with the 40-series, it seems Nvidia may constrain its own-brand cards to just the two top solutions — and probably an eventual RTX 4090 Ti and 4080 Ti later this year. That or we'll get an RTX 4070 Founders Edition, which would just feel weird after skipping the 4070 Ti.
It's not necessarily a bad thing for Nvidia to only do Founders Editions on the upper echelon of GPUs, and perhaps EVGA's decision to exit the graphics card market has something to do with it. At the same time, we do prefer to do our initial reviews of any new GPU using a reference design where possible, which we can't do with the 4070 Ti.
Nvidia instead sent us an Asus RTX 4070 Ti TUF Gaming OC. This should be a fair representation of how the basic factory overclocked cards perform, but it will also be slightly faster than the slowest designs so we're no longer looking at the minimum level of expected performance. The Asus card isn't small by any stretch, though it's at least a bit smaller than the 4080 and 4090 Founders Editions. It measures 298 x 138 x 62 mm (from the bottom of the PCIe connector to the highest point on the card) and weighs 1342g.
That makes this a full triple-slot graphics card by any normal definition, as a PCI slot is about 21mm wide, but Asus' own specs list this as a 3.25-slot design. The extra 0.25 slots is presumably to give the fans some room to breathe, so you'll want a case with plenty of space for this particular model. Asus also conveniently includes a little support stand to help prevent GPU sag — just don't forget about it and tip your case on the side, though the magnet on the bottom might be enough to keep it in place.
Asus uses the now-typical triple fan cooling setup that we see in most high-end custom cards, with three 89mm diameter fans that include an integrated rim. Considering we've seen similar designs used on cards rated for far higher power consumption, the Asus card should do just fine and generally runs cool and quiet.
As we've also seen with other recent Asus cards, there are dual HDMI 2.1 outputs plus three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs. While DP1.4a is technically worse than HDMI 2.1 and AMD's DP2.1 (54 Gbps), we now have a Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 that supports up to 4K and 240 Hz, and it also uses Display Stream Compression (DSC). We tested it out with the Asus card and it worked great, with both HDMI and DisplayPort connections. Having now also tried DSC in person, I'm also a lot more comfortable with the "visually lossless" claims — it's certainly better than 4:2:2 chroma subsampling, though even that generally looks fine at 4K with modern GPUs (not so much on an older GTX 10-series card, though).
One interesting twist is that all of the Nvidia RTX 40-series cards seem to be using a single 16-pin power connector, whether it's really needed or not. With a 4090 potentially consuming over 500W with overclocking, we could at least somewhat understand the desire to simplify connectivity, though the melting adapters didn't work out so well (even if it appears to have been at least partially user error). With a 285W TBP (total board power), Asus had no need to use a 16-pin adapter, but it did so anyway, with a two 8-pin to single 16-pin adapter included for those who don't have a newer ATX 3.0 power supply. We can't help but think the cost of the adapter has to be higher than the cost of putting two 8-pin connectors directly on the card, something we've seen for at least seven years, but Nvidia apparently doesn't want to walk back on using 16-pin connectors with the 40-series — I can't wait for RTX 4050 cards with a single 8-pin to 16-pin connector! [Note to Nvidia: That's sarcasm.]
Since the Asus card will serve as our "reference" RTX 4070 Ti for the foreseeable future, we're going to skip disassembly and teardown — we need to guarantee the card keeps working properly, and ideally not change any of the cooling or other factors. What we do know of the internals is that there are only six GDDR6X chips, 2GB each, which should be relatively easy to cool in comparison to the GPU. Also, there are GPS coordinates on the card that presumably match up with Asus' Taiwan headquarters — or something. Feel free to research that further and go visit if you happen to be in the area.
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