Asus TUF GeForce RTX 5070 12GB OC Ed.: Perfectionism

Introduction and parameters

While the more powerful GeForce RTX 50 models face no direct competition, AMD has positioned two strong contenders against the RTX 5070—the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT. Both offer slightly better value and more memory. Your choice depends on whether you need a graphics card purely for gaming or also for professional applications, and how reliant you are on Nvidia’s broader, more polished ecosystem with proprietary technologies.

Although the GeForce RTX 5070 has only been out for a few days, it’s not unfamiliar to us. We introduced it during its January announcement and covered the innovations of the RTX 50 series with the Blackwell architecture in the article Blackwell: GeForce RTX 5000 architecture and innovations [Analysis].

The newly released GeForce RTX 5070 uses the third, and so far the smallest, Nvidia chip with the Blackwell architecture. It has the codename GB205, featuring 6144 stream processors, 192 texture units, and 80 rasterization units. Unlike the earlier models with a 256-bit bus and 16 GB of memory, this one has a narrowed bus to 192 bits, resulting in a reduced total memory capacity of 12 GB.

Let me just remind you of a more detailed comparison of the RTX 5070’s parameters with the closest similar GeForce models in the following table, and we’ll focus on the Asus card itself.

The Asus TUF GeForce RTX 5070 is already among the more expensive and better-equipped models. It offers a dual BIOS with two performance modes, but this mainly affects fan control settings rather than GPU parameters. Other settings, such as clock speeds or power limits, remain the same between the Performance (P mode) and Quiet (Q mode) BIOS.

The base clock is identical to the reference specifications. The advertised boost clock is increased from 2512 to 2610 MHz, though in practice, it’s usually higher. The power limit is set at the reference 250 W, and you can manually adjust it using overclocking utilities within a range of -30% to +20%, meaning from 175 W to 300 W.

To the values from GPU-Z monitoring, I’ll add data from HWiNFO, which provides plenty of details.

The second set of images is from the Quiet BIOS, and aside from its version, there’s no difference in the other data. The only difference is the fan control curve based on temperature. With higher fan performance, the card’s temperatures drop, reducing component power consumption, which allows GPU boost to slightly increase clock speeds to reach the power limit.

However, these are usually just tens of MHz, so the performance difference is barely measurable and unnoticeable to the eye. On the other hand, you’ll hear that the card is noisier. Therefore, for performance tests, I’ll use the quieter BIOS, and if you don’t sit at your computer with headphones on all the time, I recommend switching to Q Mode as well.

• Contents
• Introduction and parameters
• Cooler design, connectors
• Test build
• Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition
• Cyberpunk 2077, native + FSR
• Cyberpunk 2077, native + DLSS
• F1 24
• 3DMark Port Royal
• Noise level, Operating characteristics – Cyberpunk, BIOS Performance
• Noise level, operating characteristics – Cyberpunk, BIOS Quiet
• Operating characteristics – F1 24, BIOS Performance
• Operating characteristics – F1 24, BIOS Quiet
• Provozní vlastnosti – Metro, BIOS Quiet
• Operating characteristics – Metro, BIOS Quiet
• Conclusion