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

Reference clocks, slightly less than reference performance

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PNY RTX 4070 card photos and unboxing
(Image: © Tom's Hardware)

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PNY RTX 4070 1080p performance charts
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

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.

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PNY RTX 4070 1080p performance charts
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

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.

Jarred Walton
Jarred Walton

Jarred Walton is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on everything GPU. He has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge '3D decelerators' to today's GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance.

8 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Yet another disappointing card, in a series filled with overpriced mediocrities - 4090 being the only exception.
    Reply
  • atomicWAR
    Great write up. I expected worse performance from the rumors floating around the web that single 8 pin cards were less performant. Yes its average clocks were a hair less at 2738 vs 2745 but that can be down to the silicon lottery at that point. Still not thrilled with the price with the alloted vram but all in all I am pleasantly surprised the card performs as well as it does.
    valthuer said:
    Yet another disappointing card, in a series filled with overpriced mediocrities - 4090 being the only exception.
    Yes and no...price and vram yes but as stated performance is decent compared to the 12vhpwr cards. But your not wrong the 4090 is the only real exception this gen. 60 percent performance for a 6% mark up. Seems fair to me...the rest of the stack not so much.
    Reply
  • atomicWAR said:
    Yes and no...price and vram yes but as stated performance is decent compared to the 12vhpwr cards.
    Unfortunately, decent performance means little to nothing, when it comes down to just 12 GBs of RAM.

    That's just not a decent amount for today's standards.

    Trust me, i've owned a 4070 Ti for approximately 5 months and had the opportunity to run some extensive tests. Bottom line, i expected more.

    At 4K max settings, it gets kicked out of games like Far Cry 6 (released on 2021) and Resident Evil 4 (remake), due to insufficient memory.

    If that's the kind of performance we get from a Ti, i don't expect a 4070 to be any better.

    Also a factor: is it gonna be any good for the games that will be released in these next few months? I don't think so.
    Reply
  • atomicWAR
    valthuer said:
    Unfortunately, decent performance means little to nothing, when it comes down to just 12 GBs of RAM.

    That's just not a decent amount for today's standards.

    Trust me, i've owned a 4070 Ti for approximately 5 months and had the opportunity to run some extensive tests. Bottom line, i expected more.

    At 4K max settings, it gets kicked out of games like Far Cry 6 (released on 2021) and Resident Evil 4 (remake), due to insufficient memory.

    If that's the kind of performance we get from a Ti, i don't expect a 4070 to be any better.

    Also a factor: is it gonna be any good for the games that will be released in these next few months? I don't think so.
    Agreed. Vram needs a boost.
    Reply
  • mrv_co
    I gave up on waiting for a 7700 XT and picked one of these up since it fit nicely in my SFF case without any modification or additional expenditures. It’s a solid step up over my 5700 XT for 1440p gaming. No complaints so far.
    Reply
  • Ricky Zeng
    mrv_co said:
    I gave up on waiting for a 7700 XT and picked one of these up since it fit nicely in my SFF case without any modification or additional expenditures. It’s a solid step up over my 5700 XT for 1440p gaming. No complaints so far.
    I'm in a very similar position. I got a 6600XT after traded-in my RX580 during the peak of pandemic / mining craze. Now waiting for a 7700/7800 as upgrade but the PNY 4070 dual fan version is really tempting, as it's one of very few that fits my A4 SFF case yet delivers good performance gains.

    I reckon tech product (CPU/GPU, or any kind of prime movers) advancement comes in from two aspects: raw power, and efficiency. If we got improvement from both that's real lucky and not happening all the time. But I'm content as long as we got improvement from at least either one. Similar performance as 6800XT with way less power draw and smaller form factor? Count me in.
    Reply
  • Karo96
    valthuer said:
    Unfortunately, decent performance means little to nothing, when it comes down to just 12 GBs of RAM.

    That's just not a decent amount for today's standards.

    Trust me, i've owned a 4070 Ti for approximately 5 months and had the opportunity to run some extensive tests. Bottom line, i expected more.

    At 4K max settings, it gets kicked out of games like Far Cry 6 (released on 2021) and Resident Evil 4 (remake), due to insufficient memory.

    If that's the kind of performance we get from a Ti, i don't expect a 4070 to be any better.

    Also a factor: is it gonna be any good for the games that will be released in these next few months? I don't think so.
    But it's not a 4K card.
    We can agree on that it should offer more Vram for future proofing. And the price is a little to steep. But a card that draws less than 200 Watts on a 1440p system is very welcome.
    Reply
  • Winterson
    Admin said:
    The PNY RTX 4070 delivers similar performance to Nvidia's reference design, but with higher temperatures and noise levels. The only real draw is its use of a single 8-pin power connector.

    PNY RTX 4070 Review: Single 8-Pin, No 16-Pin 12VHPWR : Read more
    It is also the most powerful graphics card that is a dual slot one. All the more powerful graphics card eat up 3 slots with their width. My alternative to the RTX 470 was to buy a new computer that had space for a 2.2 or wider video card.

    $3,300 for a new computer or $600 for the RTX 4070 was not a difficult choice to make. The new computer would also force my use of Windows 11 and I will buy an Apple computer before giving up my privacy to Microsoft and its minions.
    Reply