Final Thoughts on the ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 5070 Solid OC
As I mentioned in the beginning of this review the GeForce RTX 5070 was probably one of the most hyped graphics cards from the original RTX 50 series announcement. And again we have to reiterate that NVIDIA showed the graphic that said “RTX 4090 Performance” when talking about the RTX 5070. Gamers and enthusiasts had every right to be excited to get that level of performance at only $549. Sadly though, the pure rasterization performance is not there, and hell the $549 MSRP is likely not there either.
Getting into performance in our testing at pure rasterization (No RT or DLSS) the RTX 5070 is only about 12-15% faster than the RTX 4070 at 1440p and only about 10-12% faster at 4K. So yeah, not the RTX 4090-level performance that NVIDIA was claiming. At this performance level that means that the RTX 5070 is going to be a pretty good overall 1440p card, you’ll easily be able to push titles over 100 FPS. I wouldn’t necessarily want to use this card for 4K unless you turned down some settings in your games, especially considering you only have that 12GB of VRAM. With the existence of the RTX 4070 Ti and especially the RTX 4070 Super these results get more and more underwhelming.
Now where you might see RTX 4090-level performance is going to be with DLSS4. Previously with DLSS3 you would essentially get double the frame rate as it would generate a single new frame. With DLSS4 you can now generate 2 or even 3 frames, which brings your frame rate to levels you’ve likely never seen before in certain titles. While we do see a massive performance jump with DLSS4 only certain titles support it. So if you title does not support it, you are left with the that lackluster performance. There are currently over 75 games that do support DLSS4.
When it comes to pricing and availability I feel we are in that perfect storm where MSRP’s aren’t real and there is pretty much no availability. The whole RTX 50 series launch just seems like that and it is only going to get exasperated by upcoming tariffs. So first NVIDIA sets an MSRP, which most AIBs struggle to make a profit for their MSRP, non-overclocked cards. So you have less of those cards and the non-MSRP cards have a pretty high over-MSRP price, which makes them hard to justify at that price. Want just a Founders Edition? Well for the RTX 5070 NVIDIA is not even offering one till later this month for some reason and you know all of those will be gobbled up by scalers. On top of that we have upcoming tariffs and from what we’ve seen brands are already readjusting pricing as previous MSRP cards are now over MSRP. All of this for the customer is just bad and for that reason we can’t really take NVIDIA’s MSRP seriously anymore.
Case in point is Zotac’s RTX 5070 Solid OC card. Zotac let us know this morning that the MSRP is going to be $699. So a $150 premium over this phantom MSRP. Zotac does actually have an MSRP card, just the normal Solid. I really don’t know how you justify a $150 premium for a simple overclock? Both cards have the same design, same cooler, same RGB lighting, just the OC version is overlcocked. How many normal Solid cards will be available? We don’t know, and we also don’t know if the normal Solid card will even remain at the MSRP price.
Now I actually like the Solid OC card from Zotac. It is a very sleek card that is going to look great in your system and even offers some RGB lighting. The triple-fan cooling solution does a great job and is not that loud at all. It is also a truly 2-slot card so it is going to fit in a lot of smaller cases to may only support 2-slot.
AMD has yet to enter the chat as we say. Reviews of the Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 are also dropping today. Unfortunately we do not have a launch day sample so I cannot tell you how it stacks up. From AMD’s own numbers that they’ve released it does seem like it will be a compelling alternative, especially if there is availability and you can get them at a reasonable price. I think if you are someone who is looking to upgrade or buy in the 70-class performance level I would wait for real reviews of AMD’s Radeon RX 9000 series. And that is sort of where we stand at this point.
