PNY RTX 4070 SUPER Verto OC Dual Fan 12GB Review – The cheapest in its class, economical, fast and a little cheeky

After all the reviews of various models of the GeForce RTX 4070 Super, today I have the PNY RTX 4070 SUPER Verto OC Dual Fan 12GB, currently the cheapest RTX 4070 Super OC card for you in the test, whose street price is currently at 598 euros, but has also been found significantly below that in the past. As the GeForce RTX 4070 Super is selling relatively well, I spontaneously decided to do an interim test of the cheapest model. It is also the only card that has already fallen below the psychologically important 600 euro mark. You can read today in the test whether and what compromises you may have to make.

At the time, NVIDIA launched the RTX 4070 Super as a mid-range card for an RRP of 659 euros; today, the actual version is finally available for over 60 euros less. The fact that the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Non-Super can even come close with 220 watts is of course pure wishful thinking and has long since been refuted, but you can definitely see the rear lights, which is easily enough for many settings.

And as usual, there are many benchmarks, the comprehensive teardown, a very elaborate board, cooler and material analysis with some reverse engineering, as well as the analysis of power consumption and load peaks, including a suitable power supply recommendation. As I know that many colleagues will also repeat all the technical details and theory, which have already been presented in various snippets, I’ll save myself the trouble today and just briefly refer to the data already known. After all, you want to see real figures today and not PR fireworks. The specs will follow shortly, of course.

The card tested today carries a chip from the week 49 of 2023 in the form of the AD104-350-A1. And yes, it is also a Bin-1 chip, i.e. the slightly better silicon from the many buckets.

The AD 104 and the new Ada architecture

The 294.5 mm² chip of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Super is also manufactured in the TSMC 4N process and has the familiar 35.8 billion transistors. The AD104-350 has four graphic processing clusters (GPC) and 56 (instead of 46) new streaming multiprocessors (SM) with 7168 CUDA cores (instead of 5888), whose performance and energy efficiency has increased significantly compared to Ampere. In addition, there are 224 (formerly) 184 4th generation Tensor Cores and Optical Flow, which enables transformative AI technologies, including NVIDIA DLSS and the new frame rate multiplier NVIDIA DLSS 3.

The 56 (instead of 46) 3rd generation RT cores offer up to 2x ray tracing performance, while Shader Execution Reordering (SER) also 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 48 MB in total and, like the GeForce RTX 4070 Non-Super, the card uses the familiar 12 GB GDDR6X with 10500 MHz clock on a rather narrow 192-bit interface, which corresponds to a data rate of 21 Gbps and a bandwidth of 504 GB/s. The AD104-350 of the GeForce RTX 4070 also offers only one NVDEC (decoder) instead of four and a single NVENC (encoder). The AV1 encoder is said to work up to 40% more efficiently than H.264.

Here is the GPU-Z screenshot, which shows no significant increase in the boost clock except for the silly 15 MHz more, although the card then runs like hell in the real test (spoiler):

The card still relies on a PCIe Gen. 4 interface and only for the external power connection with the 12VHPWR connector (12 4 pin) on an element of the PCIe Gen. 5 specification. The TGP of the FE is 220 watts, as is that of the PNY card and, depending on the board partner, could also be increased to up to 255 watts (which is rather pointless because the voltage will be limited at some point anyway). Here is the starting point for the cards that are not overclocked ex works:

The PNY RTX 4070 SUPER Verto OC Dual Fan 12GB in detail

The card weighs a modest 679 grams, making it a real lightweight. The length of 24.7 cm is nice and small and the height of 11.5 cm is only slightly above normal. You don’t even need a trunk of a case, even if you might have to use the bulky 12VHPWR adapter without an angled cable, but it manages with 2x 6 2-pin PCIe outputs. The installation depth is 3.7 cm plus the 5 mm for the backplate attachment on the rear. This makes it a real dual-slot card without a fat belly. Thanks for that! The entire cover is made of black, simple ABS, ARGB is of course not available for cost reasons. This is an economy version, but you can live with it.

The design is familiar and the design language of the fan, cover and slot bracket is not really new either. The card uses a single BIOS and if you want to overclock, you have to use a suitable tool. The feel is average and the look is naturally quite plain. The cards have no collector’s value, but they are the cheapest representatives of this class. If you are really curious, read the material analysis.

You can not only plug power into the card, but also video connections. There are four of them, to be precise: three DisplayPort 1.4a and one HDMI 2.1a. This is a shame, especially for DisplayPort, when it comes to the new specifications. A missed opportunity, unfortunately. And with HDMI, you have to play around with the compression from 4K onwards if you want to go above 120 Hz.

That’s this first page done and we’re slowly getting ready for the test, which begins with important insights.