Introduction

Today, we bring you our review of the Palit GeForce RTX 3070 JetStream OC, the company’s premium custom-design graphics card based on NVIDIA’s RTX 3070 Ampere GPU that’s out to woo the same class of performance-segment buyers who made the RTX 2070 Super popular—performance with some future-proofing. Palit has given the JetStream OC its highest state of factory OC tune, its best aesthetics, and high-end features relevant to overclockers. The card is targeted at those looking for a premium RTX 3070 they can overclock further.

The GeForce RTX 3070 “Ampere” is based on NVIDIA’s second consumer silicon based on the new architecture, the GA104, and almost maxes it out. This chip is smaller than the GA102 that powers the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, but has a much higher CUDA core count than the previous-generation flagship, the RTX 2080 Ti. In fact, NVIDIA claims that the RTX 3070 beats the RTX 2080 Ti, which means it’s built for roughly the same use cases—1440p gaming at high frame rates, with sufficient performance for 4K UHD gaming. The e-sports crowd can expect high refresh-rate performance up to 1440p resolution, something that required them to fork out at least $700 on an RTX 2080 Super. For the full details on the RTX 3070 technology and architecture, refer to our RTX 3070 Founders Edition article.

NVIDIA’s GeForce Ampere architecture introduces the company’s 2nd generation RTX real-time raytracing technology. It combines new Ampere CUDA cores that can do concurrent FP32+INT32 math operations per clock cycle, 2nd generation RT cores that in addition to doubling the intersection performance add fixed-function hardware for more raytraced effects, and the 3rd generation Tensor cores, which leverage sparsity to speed up AI inference performance significantly over the previous generation. The RTX 3070 features 5,888 CUDA cores, 46 RT cores, 184 Tensor cores, 184 TMUs, 96 ROPs, and a 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, running 8 GB of 14 Gbps memory.

As mentioned earlier, the Palit GeForce RTX 3070 JetStream OC is the company’s premium custom-design RTX 3070 product positioned a notch below the RTX 3070 GameRock, and it brings you a large cooling solution that’s three slots thick, and two large fans, RGB LED lighting is included, too. Palit even included a large factory overclock of 1815 MHz GPU Boost (compared to the 1725 MHz reference). You also get a few handy features, such as dual-BIOS, which lets you select between the default factory-OC BIOS and a quiet BIOS with lower clocks. The card’s design sees the PCB being much shorter than the cooler, which means much of the airflow form the second fan goes through the heatsink and out of vents on the backplate. While exact pricing is difficult to find at the moment, once things normalize, the card should retail for around $520, or $20 higher than the NVIDIA Founders Edition.