PNY RTX 4070 Review: Single 8-Pin, No 16-Pin 12VHPWR

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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