ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 4070 SUPER Graphics Card Review

Yesterday, we showed you some exciting new graphics cards from Nvidia, but one thing they all had in common was that they were all MSRP graphics cards, meaning they all cost the same as the Nvidia Founders Edition. However, today it's all about non-MSRP cards, and while they may cost a little bit more, they're packing some more premium features and hopefully more performance that should help them stand out from the crowd. Such as this new one from ASUS which comes as part of their premium-grade TUF gaming series. That means more durable components and an aesthetic that matches up with the plethora of other TUF Gaming Alliance products that have been released over the years. ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER As we would expect from a TUF product, you get their more premium Axial-tech fans, which can deliver more airflow and lower noise, there are 20K military-grade capacitors which are rated for up to 105c, an a boost clock of 2475 MHz in default mode and 2505 MHz in OC mode. Most of all though, I'm expecting the more robust power delivery hardware and the larger cooler to be what makes this card perform at its best, so let's dive in for a closer look at what's on offer! Features Powered by NVIDIA DLSS3, ultra-efficient Ada Lovelace arch, and full ray tracing. 4th Generation Tensor Cores: Up to 4x performance with DLSS 3 vs. brute-force rendering 3rd Generation RT Cores: Up to 2X ray tracing performance Axial-tech fans scaled up for 21% more airflow Dual ball fan bearings last up to twice as long as conventional designs Military-grade capacitors rated for 20K hours at 105C make the GPU power rail more durable Vented exoskeleton adds structural rigidity and vents to increase heat reliability Auto-Extreme precision automated manufacturing for higher reliability GPU Tweak III software provides intuitive performance tweaking, thermal controls, and system monitoring Nvidia RTX 4070 SUPER Comparison A Closer Look First of all, this is a stunning look piece of gaming hardware, albeit, it doesn't look all the unlike previous TUF gaming cards, but if it isn't broken, don't fix it. This is a pretty significantly sized cooler too, so taming the RTX 4070 SUPER chipset should be a breeze as this cooler looks like it's lifted from a higher model in the RTX range. The cooler features three large and powerful Axial fans, which come with lots of wide and slightly overlapping fins, as well as a trim around the edge that joins the fins together. This design helps prevent air from being pushed sidewards from the fan and instead more directly down through the GPU heatsink. Unlike some of the more affordable RTX 4070 Super cards, this one features an all-metal shroud too, which looks gorgeous with its gun-metal finish. It is quite thick too, coming in at three slots it's certainly longer and thicker than a lot of the MSRP cards, but again, that increased surface area of the cooler and more fans is going to help it hit the higher boost clocks and maintain them more easily, which should mean higher FPS overall. Tucked into the side, you'll find the usual 12VHPWR, meaning it only needs a single power connector. However, there is quite a large voice in that back section too, just enough to get my little finger in, not that I think it needs more heatsink, but it would be nice to see all the available space used too. The backplate is made from a single piece of metal, and comes with this cool digital artwork printed onto it, as well as a large section of ventilation towards the back of the card, allowing more heat to be exhausted away more easily. At the back, you'll find three DisplayPort and one HDMI connection, the same as seen on the Founders Edition of the RTX 4070 Super. With the PCB torn down, the PCB looks surprisingly clean and tidy. There are six memory ICs, each is 2GB and gives us the 12GB VRAM total. All of the capacitors and chokes on the VRM have been upgraded to premium-grade hardware, such as those 20K 105c-rated capacitors which are much more durable and reliable than the ones seen on the MSRP cards. There's even more on the back of the PCB too, which I haven't seen on any other RTX 4070 Super yet, so the overall power delivery and power conditioning is certainly upgraded here. The heatsink is huge, with six massive heat pipes running through the largest section of the heatsink, and three more through the block directly above the GPU. There are good quality thermal pads deployed on the memory ICs, as well as each bank of capacitors, ensuring all many components are directly cooled. The fans are all mounted into the single-piece shroud which is plastic on the inside but has that metal skin on the exterior. The fans are all screwed into flexible mounts with anti-vibration pads on the back to prevent vibrations against the heatsink. How We Test We continue to update our testing methods around once per year. As such, we re-test older hardware to reflect changes over time. These can be driver updates, Windows updates, game patches, and more; all of which have an impact on performance figures. Furthermore, we update our test benches to newer and more relevant hardware. This means that our new reviews aren’t always comparable to those of older reviews, so please compare the testing methodology on older reviews should you be trying to compare them with newer ones. Replicate Our Results When it comes to our benchmarks in our reviews, the benchmarks are pretty self-explanatory and are kept as simple as possible, although there are a few exceptions. Remember that your choice of a graphics card, CPU, the silicon lottery, and other factors can yield different numbers, and there’s always a margin for error when using any software. Links are provided below, as well as the settings we use. We encourage you to not just look at how one product compares to any other, but how it compares to your own. If you’re looking to build a new system, you should benchmark your current PC using the benchmarks available to you. You should then look at the percentage improvement from your current hardware to the hardware tested here to give you a ballpark figure of how much of an upgrade this will provide you with. Processor Test Systems Test System (GPU) Motherboard Gigabyte B650E AORUS MASTER Buy Now Processor Ryzen 7 7800X3D Review Buy Now GPU Changes Per Review RAM Corsair VENGEANCE RGB 6000MHz CL30 Review Buy Now CPU Cooler NZXT Kraken Z73 RGB Buy Now Power Supply NZXT C1000 Gold Review Buy Now Storage Seagate FIRECUDA 530 1TB Review Buy Now Chassis NZXT H9 Flow Review Buy Now OS Windows 11 Pro Version 21H2 Drivers AMD Graphics: 22.10.1NVIDIA Graphics: 521.90 Software We use a variety of software from different developers to assist in our testing and to give us the most consistent results possible. Some applications are specifically used for testing, while others are simply used for monitoring and to aid us in making sure that our results are as accurate as possible. Gaming To gauge performance levels which are easily reproduced time after time, by both ourselves and our readers, we now stick strictly to games' default profiles. Given how powerful most modern cards are getting, we've begun using more demanding profiles for most games, but will otherwise state on a per-game basis if we use other profiles beyond High, Ultra, Maximum or their respective equivalent at all resolutions. V-Sync is always disabled in our testing, and all FPS caps that can be removed are. We also enable XMP and Resizable bar technology across all platforms to keep things as fair as possible. Games While we test a lot of games, it's not possible to display all of the data on the website or in our videos. Instead, we include access to all of our testing data for our Patreon members (link), where members get a ton of other benefits as well. What we do, however, is display charts for averages across all game titles to give a better picture of performance across all titles tested. Call Of Duty Warzone Cyberpunk 2077 Death Stranding Watch Dogs: Legion Resolutions 1440p (2560 x 1440) Some tests will also include features such as NVIDIA DLSS and Ray Tracing. However, these will be clearly labelled and may only appear in reviews for graphics cards that support those features. Power Consumption Not being content on simply reading total system power draw, we now run F1 22 for an hour loop and measure power draw at the end of the loop for the most accurate measurement that represents real-world gameplay experience. Temperatures We take temperature readings after the same hour long F1 22 loop with no other background programs running, again to simulate a real-world gaming experience. Now when it comes to testing different models of the same GPU, we don’t bother running it through the same amount of tests because some models are so close in performance to each other, that we wouldn’t really be showing too much. Instead, we run it in a small smattering of games to make sure that the figures are where we expect them to be, based on a baseline from our initial launch day review, where in this case, we used the RTX 4070 SUPER Founders card, so for this, we booted up 6 different games at 1440p, which is where the 4070 SUPER is targeted at, to see if both the ASUS and Gigabyte gave us any extra performance. Baldur's Gate 3 So starting with Baldur’s Gate 3 where our performance on the FE card was already at 126 FPS but the ASUS came in 5% faster at 132 FPS and the Gigabyte Gaming OC at 134 FPS making it 6% faster, so some fairly strong gains over a reference spec. This also puts both cards slightly above the 3080 Ti and edging closer to the performance of the 4070 Ti. Call Of Duty Modern Warfare II Booting up Call Of Duty where our baseline was set at 130 FPS, the ASUS didn’t offer much in extra performance at 131 FPS so definitely within the margin of error while the Gigabyte card did improve on that a little more at 133 FPS so still within the same margin of error but slightly higher with a 2% improvement overall. Cyberpunk 2077 In Cyberpunk, our FE scores an impressive 83 frames per second and again ASUS came in just a single FPS higher so a 1% margin, but if we were to test again, we could see the FE increase by a frame and the ASUS TUF Gaming drop by a frame, so pretty matched performance. Again, Gigabyte did come out on top at 86 FPS which is a 4% lead over the Founders card, but we generally consider anything under around 5% to be within a marginal difference and would typically call it as the same performance plus or minus. Marvels Spider-Man Remastered Moving onto Spider-Man and 181 FPS was the number to beat and both did, with the ASUS coming in at 184 FPS and the Gigabyte at 188 so about 2% and 4% respectively, so again Gigabyte is the faster of the two, but in terms of real-world gameplay, it’s not anything that you’d notice anyway. Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart In Ratchet & Clank at 1440p, the 4070 SUPER comes in with performance at 124 FPS with the ASUS just ahead by 2% at 124 FPS and the Gigabyte ahead again further than that at 129 frames per second, putting it 4% ahead of the FE. Starfield Then lastly in Starfield, we see our biggest gains from the 85 FPS that the FE gave us to 93 FPS on the Gigabyte which is a 9% increase, and 94 FPS on the ASUS card which is an impressive 11% improvement so there are gains to be had depending on the game you play. Power & Temperatures The ASUS TUF Gaming also manages to keep temps low with a core temperature of about 61 degrees whilst the hot spot sits around 70 degrees on average. The memory is the hottest part at around 72 degrees, but at that temperature, it’s still nothing particularly warm for a GPU of this calibre. In terms of clock speeds we see nothing unexpected with a high core clock of 2750MHz on average so not as high as the Gigabyte but still higher than the MSRP cards we looked at yesterday. The card consumed around 219 Watts of power on average whilst the fan barely span up and only sat around 1350 RPM throughout the test, meaning that you could easily bump the fan speed and see a lot of improvements in the already reasonable temperatures and possibly even see a boost in the clock speeds. How Much Does it Cost? The Nvidia RTX 4070 Super hits the market with an MSRP of just £599, with the Founders Edition and other MSRP cards hitting that price range. Obviously, non-MSRP cards will be more than that, with the Gigabyte RTX 4070 Super OC coming in at £50 more, making it £649. However, the ASUS card is an eye-watering £725, quite a leap up, but it only goes to make the Gigabyte card look like better value for money. You could argue that the ASUS card is a more premium quality card, despite the similar performance, and it's really down to the consumer if they want to pay extra, which is something ASUS fans have had to live with for a long time now anyway. Given that the price of the upcoming RTX 4070 Ti Supers is said to be £799 and the RTX 4080 Super at £999, at least for the MSRP cards, it would make sense to keep some space between each model. Considering the older non-Super RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4080 models are now officially end of life and these new cards are replacing them, it makes the Super variants extremely appealing, with more power for the same price, it's really hard to argue. It seemed like prices would keep going up forever, but at least for now, things are heading in the right direction. You can check Amazon for up-to-date stock and prices of the RTX 4070 Super here. Overview The MSRP cards we tested yesterday were an impressive start to the new RTX 4070 Super series, which saw performance improve about 10-20 FPS pretty much across the board, with an uplift in ray tracing, DLSS and other features performance too, but best of all, it did all that while still hitting the same MSRP of the older model. However, they were all MSRP cards yesterday, and this ASUS model is a fair bit more expensive. Gigabyte's card was another £50 on top of MSRP, but better quality and performance justify that. For AASUS it's another £125 and that is a lot of money no matter which way you look at it. ASUS are typically the most expensive brand anyway, just because, it's the ASUS tax, and it's been a thing for as long as I can remember. However, it's not all just lighting money on fire, as this is technically a much better card than the MSRP cards, and even more robust than the premium Gigabyte card. There are upgraded capacitors, chokes and a more robust VRM overall, there's a more premium thick metal shroud with a gorgeous sandblasted gun-metal finish, a full-metal backplate, a much heavier and more robust heatsink, better fans, and the card is just simply bigger too. It's not hard to see where the extra investment is going, and if you're ragging your card to its limits all day and night long, you can bet this one will be more stable than most thanks to the upgraded hardware. Should I Buy One? Both of these new cards performed well, offering a nice premium take on the already performance-boosting aspects of the new Super variant of the RTX 4070. However, the AMD RX 7800 XT is still a strong contender and cheaper too, but Nvidia does have a more developed and mature suite of technologies on their cards, such as AI technology integrations, DLSS, frame generation, ray tracing and much more that can certainly be worth paying the extra premium for. MSRP Cards Nvidia RTX 4070 Super Founders Edition Graphics Card Review Gigabyte RTX 4070 Ti Super OC Graphics Card Review INNO3D RTX 4070 Super Twin X2 Graphics Card Review Palit RTX 4070 Super Dual Graphics Card Review Zotac Gaming RTX 4070 Super Trinity Black Edition Graphics Card Review Non-MSRP Cards ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 4070 SUPER Graphics Card Review Gigabyte RTX 4070 SUPER Gaming OC Graphics Card Review