Asus Dual RTX 4070 12G or RTX 3080 cease to make sense

GeForce RTX 4070 graphics cards fill a large gap between the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4060 Ti, and in terms of speed or gaming performance, they hover around the RTX 3080. But that’s with many advantages, including half the power draw with the RTX 4070. With cheaper designs, such as the tested Asus Dual variant, the price/performance ratio is also more attractive with the RTX 4070 (compared to discount RTX 3080s).

Conclusion

Attractive not only in terms of efficiency, but also in terms of price/performance ratio. For speed reasons, it may not be worth upgrading from the RTX 3070 (Ti), but when buying a new PC, the RTX 4070 is already an all-around better choice than the RTX 3080. Moreover, new RTX 3080s are often more expensive and second-hand ones in turn don’t come with a full warranty.

At QHD resolution, the average gaming performance of the Asus Dual RTX 4070 12G is virtually the same as the Aorus RTX 3080 Xtreme 10G or the Radeon RX 6800 XT. The crucial difference, however, is that the RTX 4070 gives it at half (compared to the RTX 3080) or two-thirds (compared to the RX 6800 XT) the power draw. In Ultra HD, the RTX 4070 already loses a little (7%) to the RTX 3080, but in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, for example it has a bit of an edge. Most of the time, however, the RTX 4070 lags behind and sometimes significantly more than the average drop. In the Control, the RTX 4070 is the slower card of the pair by up to 27%. But that’s still talking about UHD resolution, in QHD the gap is already narrowing. In Full HD, where CPU limits have a significant impact on performance, the RTX 4070 is already 6% faster on average compared to the RTX 3080. But take this as a purely indicative figure and show that “driver overhead” is a bigger problem for Pascal than it is for Ada Lovelace. With slower processors than the test Ryzen 9 5900X, the difference in Full HD will be greater (than that 6%), and with faster ones it may be a little smaller.

In any case, the RTX 4070 is a graphics card particularly suited to higher resolutions, and it can handle many titles with the highest visual settings at fps above 60 even in Ultra HD. But then there are quite a few where the framerate in more demanding scenes falls below that threshold and to eliminate these cases you either need to reduce the details, the resolution or, of course, use DLSS. The RTX 4070’s advantage over the RTX 3080 in this regard is also in its support for DLSS 3 (and its Frame Generation, which is of particular interest to owners of older processors).

GPU temperature is exceedingly low, but here you have to take into account that this is alongside the relatively high noise level of the cooler. If you’re after quieter operation, you’ll need to mechanically change the default BIOS “Performance” to “Quiet” during installation, this via a two-position switch on the side of the card. Then you might be more concerned with the sound of the coils. Those are relatively quiet though. They are characterized by a thin high-frequency peak at 17.2 kHz, but you need a really good ear to hear that, so some may not care about it at all. Especially in a closed PC case environment, where it fades out. You probably won’t miss the 5–10 kHz critical band, but compared to most other cards (even slower ones) it’s less noisy and more acoustically pleasing, not characterized by tonal peaks anymore. Considering the lower class that Dual graphics cards belong to, we have to give the acoustic properties around the coils some well-deserved praise.

GPU clock speeds in gaming boost exceed the claimed values in practice by 190–330 MHz (the upper limit corresponds to games that put less load on the GPU). 2805 MHz is also stably achieved in Blender, but that’s also due to (as in CS:GO) lower loads that don’t hit power limits.

So, in summary, the RTX 4070 brought top-notch efficiency to a higher performance class, while delivering an impressive price/performance ratio. Additionally, the Asus Dual’s design is very solid, whether it’s the cooler effectiveness, the acoustic properties of the coils, or the overall compatibility for the relatively lower profile and smaller length. For a set of favorable features, we award this graphics card the “Smart buy!” award.

English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš

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For cooperation in providing the tested hardware, we would like to give special thanks to the Datacomp e-shop