NVIDIA RTX 3070 Founders Edition Overview
When I first picked up the NVIDIA RTX 3070 it felt really solid, which obviously is a good thing. Earlier this year when we first saw the designs of the new Founders Edition cards from NVIDIA I wasn’t really sold on them, but seeing the card is person it really is beautiful. The card mixes black, grey, and silver together in a way that makes it look very elegant and you can tell by handling it that it is a high quality product.
The RTX 3070 is a much smaller card than the RTX 3080 or RTX 3090. For those wondering the length of the card is 242 mm, which is slightly longer than NVIDIA’s own RTX 2070 Founders Edition.
Unlike the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 Founders Editions which have a fan on either side of the card, the RTX 3070 has two fans on the same side of the card in more of a traditional design. The fan towards the front of the card actually just sits over a heatsink so it will push air through the card like the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090.
Flipping the card over to the back we have a full-cover metal backplate that says “RTX 3070” pretty small on it. Towards the end there is an opening for the fan we mentioned to push air through the card.
The RTX 3070 does not have any light-up logos on it like the RTX 3080 or RTX 3090, instead it just says “GEFORCE RTX” on the side of the card. In the center of the card you’ll find the new 12-pin power connector. This connector was designed to provide more power in a smaller footprint than the typically PCI-Express power connectors we are used to using. The single 12-pin power adapter is capable of 300W of power (2 8-pin PCIe cables), since the RTX 3070 only requires 225W the adapter that NVIDIA includes only has a single 8-pin connection. That means you are getting 150W from the 12-pin and 75W from the PCI-Express slot. While I like the new 12-pin power connector its placement is a little odd as it sits right in the middle of the card. This means when you plug in the adapter it is always going to be visible and hard to make it look good inside your case.
Coming over to display outputs the RTX 3070 has three DisplayPort 1.4a connectors and a single HDMI 2.1 connector. Like the RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 the USB-C port we saw on 20-series RTX cards is gone. I assume many people did not really use it and it did not really catch on like NVIDIA expected.
