PNY GeForce RTX 4070 VERTO Dual Fan 12GB Review – How to make Cheap good

I already wrote about the cheaper MSRP cards and the resulting cost down. With the GeForce RTX 4070 Verto 12GB, PNY tries to square the circle, so to speak, by not saving essential things, but only the rather unimportant ones. More voltage converters, fewer fans and instead of a massive cooler design, a cleverly stabilized lightweight implementation that cleanly does what is expected of it in the end. Of course, all this is not without compromises, but the need to save money has not been pushed through at the expense of durability. PNY surely still had in mind that they also manufacture and market NVIDIA’s commercial graphics card division, which requires a certain quality standard. Today you can read whether and how we succeeded.

The current street price is around 664 Euros, which is about 5 Euros above the MSRP. This may also be due to the fact that the current sales channels are not among the cheap stores, which is a bit annoying. The card could certainly be 20 to 30 Euros cheaper (in terms of the FoB price) even after the last rebate campaign, although the retailer unfortunately strikes again and doesn’t care about the MSRP. One can only advise PNY to look for other distribution channels for the RTX 4070, because it works for the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti as well.

The manufacturer sets the power limit to 200 watts by default, which is completely justified. Let’s remember my launch article, where even the NVIDIA RTX 4070 FE never really reached this value despite the 200 watts at the preset power limit. Thus, the card tested today is a real non-OC card and cannot become one because the BIOS does not allow it. But you can certainly live with that. How good, we’ll see in a moment.

Of course, there is, as usual, the comprehensive teardown, an extensive board and cooler analysis with some reverse engineering, as well as the analysis of the power consumption and the load peaks including a suitable power supply recommendation. Since I know that many colleagues will also repeat all the technical details including theory, which have already been presented in various tidbits, I’ll spare myself that today on a large scale and only briefly refer to the already known data. In terms of benchmarks, I refer here to the 200-Watt variant from my launch review, because both cards, both the PNY GeForce RTX 4070 Verto x2 and NVIDIA’s Founders Edition are within a tolerance range of less than 1% here. These are measurement errors that can be safely ignored.

The AD 104 and the new Ada architecture

The 294.5 mm² chip of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 is also manufactured in the TSMC 4N process and has 35.8 billion transistors. The AD104-250 still has four Graphic Processing Clusters (GPC) and 46 new Streaming Multiprocessors (SM) with 5888 CUDA cores, whose performance and energy efficiency have increased significantly compared to Ampere. In addition, there are 184 tensor cores of the 4th generation. Generation and Optical Flow, enabling transformative AI technologies including NVIDIA DLSS and the new NVIDIA DLSS 3 frame rate multiplier.

The 46 RT cores of the 3rd generation The new generation offers up to 2x ray tracing performance, Shader Execution Reordering (SER) improves ray tracing operations by a factor of two. In addition, there are a total of 23 Texture Processing Clusters (TPC), 184 Texture Units (TU) and 64 ROPs. The L2 cache is 36864 KB in total and the card, like the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, uses the familiar 12 GB GDDR6X clocked at 10500 MHz on a rather narrow 192-bit interface, which corresponds to a data rate of 21 Gbps and a bandwidth of 504 GB/s. The AD104-250 of the GeForce RTX 4070 only offers one NVDEC (decoder) instead of four and a single NVENC (encoder). The AV1 encoder is said to be up to 40% more efficient than H.264.

 

PNY GeForce RTX 4070 Verto 2x 12 GB in detail

The card weighs only 687 grams, which is about 300 grams less than the already compact FE. The length of 24.7 cm is nice and short and the height of 11.5 cm is also on the normal size. There you do not need so much space housing, especially because you do not have to use a 12VHPWR adapter. The installation depth is 3.5 cm plus the 5 mm for the backplate on the rear. This makes it a pure and compact dual-slot card.

The design language of the fan, cover and slot bezel is rather restrained and somehow also completely unexciting. Thus, the haptics and looks are rather mediocre, because even the anthracite-gray plastic cover is nothing that pulls the haptic and optical sausage off the plate now. RGB LED applications or at least printed color accents are also missing. For example, this is such an economy item, which is not pleasing to the eye, but also leaves more room for the hardware.

The card still relies on a PCIe Gen. 4 interface and the nice 8-pin connector. The preset TBP is 200 watts and cannot be increased (which is often pointless anyway, because the voltage limits at some point anyway). This is also the reason for using the 8-pin connector.

But you can not only put power into the card, but also video connections. There are four of them, to be quite precise, as there are: three times DisplayPort 1.4a and once HDMI 2.1a. That is especially a pity for the DisplayPort when it comes to the new specifications. Opportunity missed, unfortunately. And with HDMI, you have to trick with the compression from 4K onwards if you want it to go above 120 Hz. I’ll go into the two screws later in the teardown, because they are incredibly important.

The screenshot from GPU-Z shows us default settings of the RTX 4070, which are identical for all 200-Watt cards:

With this, the first page is finished and we are slowly preparing for the test. For the forgetful or newcomers, I’ve also linked to the launch article again, which offers more details and my comments on the MSRP cards: