Introduction

ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti OC is the company’s affordable custom-design implementation of the brand new performance-segment GPU by NVIDIA, positioned a notch below its ROG Strix series. The TUF Gaming brand of graphics cards gained prominence with the RTX 30-series “Ampere” for striking a great balance between the product design gamers want, and a value feature-set that covers all the essentials, rounding up a solid, reliable package. With the RTX 40-series “Ada,” ASUS is sticking to this formula, by giving this card a “tough” industrial product feel, with a design focus on a well-ventilated cooling solution, a minor factory-overclock, and durability you come to expect from ASUS. For flashy RGB lighting, fan-headers, and other such goodies, you should seek out the ROG Strix products.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is the company’s third desktop RTX 40-series “Ada” graphics card, and its launch in early January has a bit of a controversial story attached to it. This SKU was formerly regarded as the “RTX 4080 12 GB,” and was supposed to launch mid-November 2022, alongside a 16 GB sibling bearing the same “RTX 4080” model number. It turned out that the two SKUs were vastly different—not counting the memory size—, and that the RTX 4080 12 GB was based on a physically smaller silicon, with 21% fewer shaders, RT cores, and Tensor cores; and its memory bus was 25% narrower, besides the reduction in memory size. This would’ve meant that a vast performance gap would emerge between the 12 GB and 16 GB models, and since the 12 GB would still bear the “4080” branding, NVIDIA could price it as high as $900 (MSRP). After some pushback on social media and the press, NVIDIA decided to cancel the RTX 4080 12 GB, and re-launch it today as the RTX 4070 Ti, at a slightly lower starting price of $800.

We already know the specs of this card from NVIDIA’s November 2022 announcement of the RTX 4080 series. The card is based on the 4 nm “AD104” silicon, NVIDIA’s third-biggest chip based on the “Ada” graphics architecture. The RTX 4070 Ti maxes it out, enabling all 7,680 CUDA cores across 60 SM, along with 60 RT cores, 240 Tensor cores, 240 TMUs, and 80 ROPs. The card gets 12 GB of memory across a 192-bit wide GDDR6X memory interface, which ticks at 21 Gbps, working out to 504 GB/s of memory bandwidth, which may pale in comparison to the 760 GB/s of the RTX 3080 10 GB (similar launch MSRP), or the 608 GB/s of the RTX 3070 Ti, but NVIDIA claims to have straightened out many of its memory performance bottlenecks at the architecture-level, with much larger on-die caches on the GPU.

The ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 4070 Ti OC comes with a slightly lighter version of the TUF Gaming “Vented Exoskeleton” cooling solution that minimizes the cooler shroud in favor of large vents for the heatsink underneath to vent out exhaust. The card is strictly 3 slots thick, compared to the 3.5-slot RTX 4080 TUF Gaming. With this generation, NVIDIA is standardizing the ATX 12VHPWR power connector, even in this segment of the market. The card also comes with a nifty little factory overclock, with the GPU Boost set at 2730 MHz, compared to 2610 MHz reference, and the memory untouched at 21 Gbps. ASUS is pricing the card at a $50 premium over the $800 baseline pricing.