Introduction

We have with us the PNY GeForce RTX 3070 XLR8 Revel Epic-X RGB graphics card. The XLR8 (reads “accelerate”) line of graphics cards by PNY targets the gaming and PC enthusiast community and comes with the trust creative professionals associate with the PNY brand. PNY is a major vendor of professional visualization graphics cards based on NVIDIA Quadro graphics processors, as well as a leading vendor of flash memory products used by photographers and cinematographers. Palit-Gainward has been PNY’s manufacturing partner for these XLR8 graphics cards, and the RTX 3070 XLR8 Revel bears a striking resemblance to the Gainward RTX 3070 Phoenix GS.

The GeForce RTX 3070 is a fascinating performance-segment product that’s dancing on the edge of the enthusiast segment. NVIDIA claims it’s designed to perform better than the previous-generation flagship, the RTX 2080 Ti, but at half the price. This would mean the RTX 3070 has the same performance outlook as the RTX 2080 Ti—to enable maxed out gaming with RTX-on at 1440p resolution, 4K UHD gaming with RTX-off, or DLSS Quality enabled. It should also let e-sports gamers play at 1440p with high refresh rates.

At its heart, the RTX 3070 is based on the 8 nm “GA104” silicon, which it nearly maxes out. This is NVIDIA’s second-largest GeForce “Ampere” silicon. The company used a conventional memory setup by giving it 8 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory bus, same as the RTX 2070. For the full details on the RTX 3070 technology and architecture, refer to our RTX 3070 Founders Edition article.

The GeForce Ampere graphics architecture heralds the 2nd generation of NVIDIA’s path-breaking RTX technology, which leverages real-time raytracing and AI deep-learning to dramatically uplift eye candy. It combines new Ampere CUDA cores capable of concurrent INT32+FP32 operations, 2nd gen RT cores that double the ray intersection performance over the 1st gen and add more hardware to accelerate newer kinds of raytraced effects, and 3rd gen Tensor cores that leverage the sparsity phenomenon to build and train AI deep-learning neural nets faster.

The PNY RTX 3070 XLR8 Revel Epic-X features a massive triple-slot product design with a triple-fan heatsink. The cooler is longer than the PCB underneath, so airflow from one of the fans flows right through because of vents on the backplate. The card also features a rugged industrial design, and a tastefully executed RGB LED illumination. Interestingly, our card sticks with NVIDIA-reference clock speeds, with its GPU Boost set to 1725 MHz and memory left untouched at 14 Gbps.