GeForce RTX 3070 Deals: Where to Find Them

A true GeForce RTX 3070 standalone deal won't likely materialize any time this side of 2023. If you want to buy one of Nvidia's RTX 3070 series cards — meaning, a GeForce RTX 3070, GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, or a mobile RTX 3070 — you're going to pay more than Nvidia's $499 and $599 MSRPs for the foreseeable future, or at least until the RTX 40-series Lovelace GPUs arrive.

There may be occasional limited quantities available at physical stores like Best Buy and Micro Center, but the best graphics cards and every recent GPU in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy command a premium these days. So any ‘deal’ that you can actually find now is going to be less about paying lower than the suggested retail price and more about paying as little as possible.

We'll cover how to find the best RTX 3070 deals below, including those which involve getting a prebuilt desktop or a laptop with RTX 3070 inside. You can also check out our GeForce RTX 3080 deals and GeForce RTX 3060 deals. For those eager to jump ahead, we've put a few quicks up front.

Quick Links: Best RTX 3070 Deals

Most online retailers are continually out of stock when it comes to the GeForce RTX 3070 series cards. Finding an RTX 3070 or RTX 3070 Ti on eBay, on the other hand, isn't particularly difficult. Apply all the usual wise buying advice — don't purchase from new accounts, read the description carefully, and any deal that looks too good to be true almost certainly is — but we don't encourage people to buy from scalpers as that just makes them want to continue.

While the Newegg Shuffle might seem enticing, your odds of getting selected for an RTX 3070 have to be incredibly low — I've entered well over 100 times (on every item) and only been picked four times, twice for CPUs and twice for GPU bundles priced at over $2,000. If you can find a card that's actually in stock, Newegg still might be your best bet, but do note that the typical price for the RTX 3070 is over twice the MSRP in all of the cases we checked.

The RTX 3070 Ti takes the same GA104 GPU but pairs it with GDDR6X memory and a fully enabled chip that has 6144 CUDA cores. In practice, our testing shows the RTX 3070 Ti performs about 7% better than the vanilla RTX 3070, while drawing 30% more power. As such, it’s not our favorite card of the RTX 30-series, and it still has to make do with only 8GB of VRAM, something that's proving to be a limiting factor in some of the latest games. The one positive is that the 3070 Ti cards all feature Nvidia's hashrate limiter, making them less desirable for cryptocurrency mining, which leads to similar pricing compared to the RTX 3070. Here's a look at what we're seeing:

Considering the relatively minor improvement in performance and the higher price, the main benefit for the RTX 3070 Ti is that miners don't like it as much. But with the LHR limiter at least partially cracked (you can get about 70% of "normal" performance now), it's still in high demand. The Shuffle price looks pretty reasonable, but is practically impossible to actually get, with eBay being slightly lower than the third-party sellers on Newegg and Amazon.

Ideally, we'd like to see deals where the price of the RTX 3070 is $750 or less, and the RTX 3070 Ti is $850 or less. If you can find such a deal, it's probably worth buying, assuming you don't get scammed.

There are similar RTX 3070 deals sold elsewhere, and the general rule of thumb seems to be pairing an RTX 3070 with a Core i5 or Ryzen 5 CPU (or better), 16GB of memory, and 500GB or more of SSD storage. You'll want to pay attention to the CPU generation as well as the motherboard chipset, PSU rating, and other accessories, but pricing on the cheapest PCs starts at around $1,500.

For example, the Sytech Azure Gaming PC costs $1,519 and includes a Ryzen 5 3600, B450 motherboard, 16GB RAM, 1TB M.2 SSD, 650W 80 Plus Gold PSU, and Windows 10. While the CPU and motherboard are a step down from the best CPUs for gaming, they're still sufficient. Also, these appear to be factory refurbished units, probably PCs that were initially shipped with an older generation graphics card and are now being upgraded and resold. Newegg also has open box ABS Gladiator PCs starting at $1,444, with a Core i5-10600K (two generations old now), Z490 motherboard, 16GB RAM, 700W PSU, and Windows 10.

Since the RTX 3070 graphics card goes for $1,100 or more by itself in most cases, you're potentially getting an entire PC for just a few hundred dollars more. Factor in the OS, assembly, and testing and you can see why some people might just buy a prebuilt PC for the GPU, pull that out, and sell off the rest of the system. Based on the cost of the other components, which would be around $625, not including the OS, you'd be paying about $820 for the RTX 3070. That's still 60% more than the MSRP, but it's also at least 20% less than buying a standalone card. Factor in another $200 for the OS and assembly and you're practically at MSRP.

Doing the same for the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti results in decidedly less-compelling options, nearing the same prices we saw on GeForce RTX 3080 deals. There's a CyberPowerPC rig at Best Buy for $2,099, with a Core i7-11700KF, 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM, and Windows 11. Even after putting $200 of the cost toward assembly and the OS, which seems fair, we still end up with a cost for the RTX 3070 Ti of around $1,100. In other words, for the small 7% boost in performance that the RTX 3070 Ti offers, you're much better off opting for the RTX 3070.

The mobile GeForce RTX 3070 uses the same GA104 chip as the desktop parts, but it's trimmed down to just 5120 CUDA cores and runs slower 12 Gbps GDDR6 memory. Basically, depending on the laptop, we'd expect it to be around 20% slower than the desktop cards. But laptops have other benefits, mostly revolving around portability. You'll still want to be plugged in for gaming purposes, but at least you can head over to a friend's place, or a LAN party, or whatever without having to pack up a bunch of extra stuff.

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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.