ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 4070 White OC

I have been considering buying a 4070 for the last few months, watching as the prices drop slightly. I considered a number of options, even the cheapest possible model but I read bad things about this dual fan design and I really wanted one that was well-built and has three fans. My Corsair 5000T case is huge and a shorter graphics card just looks weird in my case, whether or not the GPU die actually needs 3x fans to keep it cool or not. I also wanted RGB because my whole build has lots of color and my previous 6700XT just looked out of place with no RGB whatsoever. The Strix models are not known as being affordable, but they are the best looking cards on the market and ASUS doesn't cut corners or cheap out on the components or cooling. I owned a 3000 series Strix card and I really loved it and thought it looked amazing, so I figured I might as well grab one of these since the OC model was down to $20 lower than I had seen it before. And it was less than $50 more than the TUF card which I was considering buying. A lot of people seem to think that the Strix RTX 4070 is using the same cooler as the 4090 model, but it's actually not the same one. This is about 19mm shorter in length and about 8mm shorter in height (the width is the same size as the 4090, as that is a fixed dimension that can't be changed or it wouldn't be compatible with standard case sizes). I love unboxing the Strix cards and seeing what extras they give you, although it feels like less with the 4000 series than the 3000 series. They included a phone stand, a Strix branded velcro strip (only 1x though), the collector's trading card, and the GPU support stand that doubles as a screwdriver. Last generation they also included a cool ruler with electrical symbols you see on circuit diagrams, but I guess they didn't want to do that this time. So, when it comes to thermals, this thing is super cool, as you would expect with this giant cooler on a card with a 200 watt TDP. Although, the OC version of the Strix 4070 has an available 120% power budget for overclocking, whereas the TUF model only has 108% power available. This card is clocked at 2610MHz out of the box, but I see it go as high as 2880MHz, before making any manual adjustments to the clock speeds. I'm still playing around with what I can get away with in terms of overclocking, I know I can do +120MHz on the GPU core and 500MHz on the Memory and everything is still stable. This will show as right around 3000MHz on MSI overlay, with Memory sitting at 11,000MHz. This card seems to perform about 3-5% faster than a standard RTX 4070, at least at 1440p and my monitor's native resolution which is 3840x1600, this is an ultrawide 12:5 aspect ratio. It's kind of a halfway point between 1440p and 4k, with a total of 6.1 million pixels (75% of the pixel count of native 4k). When using Path Tracing in Alan Wake 2/Cyberpunk 2077, this card still doesn't go above 62 degrees and sometimes sits as low as 57 degrees, that's while drawing 210 to 220 watts using the factory OC of 2610MHz. When I am not running a game, the fans on this card don't even spin up. But when gaming, it's still inaudible, I mean it's so whisper quiet that I can't hear it even with my ceiling fan and air conditioner turned off in my bedroom. If you want a very well made, thermally overbuilt graphics card that looks amazing with a fair amount of RGB, then this is a good choice if you don't mind spending the extra money. It's still over $100 less than the cheapest 4070Ti models, although this could change if Nvidia drops some Super cards into the mix. They are rumored to be doing so in January at CES. Update: Now that the 4070 Super is available (with roughly 15-20% perf improvement), given that the Strix is one of the most expensive models, I don’t think this product is really a smart buy anymore. I wanted a new card and I don’t regret it because I’m happy with ~3080 level performance (with better RT perf). You can now get 3080Ti-3090 level performance for this same price (or less). Although the Strix models of 4070S will be more expensive than this is.