What is the upgrade in GIGABYTE AORUS GeForce RTX 3070 Master 8G? Like all RTX 3070 Ti cards, it makes use of the fully enabled chip, with the maximum 6,144 cores unlocked. This compares to the 5,888 of the RTX 3070 and 4,864 of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. The bigger upgrade, though, is the switch to faster GDDR6X memory. This alone provides a bandwidth gain of over 30% over the RTX 3070. Explore more in GIGABYTE AORUS GeForce RTX 3070 Master 8G (REV2.0) graphics card review.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Effective and useful LCD info screen
- Ray tracing + DLSS 2.0 performance
- Excellent thermal performance
- Excellent cooling system
- Offer of connectors for connecting screens,
Cons
- Consumption and heating compared to the RX 6800 competition
- It’s a bit noisy at stock
Specs – GIGABYTE AORUS GeForce RTX 3070 Master 8G (REV2.0) graphics card
- GPU: Nvidia GA104
- CUDA cores: 6,144
- Boost clock speed: 1,875MHz
- Memory capacity: 12GB GDDR6X
- Memory speed: 19Gbps
- Outputs: 3x DisplayPort 1.4a, 2x HDMI 2.1, 1x HDMI
- Power connectors: 1x 6-pin, 2x 8-pin
- GPU Interface PCIe x16
- GPU Chipset GeForce RTX 3070
- GPU Memory Size 8GB
- GPU Memory Type GDDR6
- GPU Clock Rate 1500MHz
- GPU Boost Clock Rate 1845MHz
- TDP 220W
- Length 290mm
- Cooling Type 3 Fans
- Power Connectors 2 PCIe 8-pin
GIGABYTE AORUS GeForce RTX 3070 Master 8G (REV2.0) graphics card review
Build
The cooler is shielded with a plastic body on the back of which is a large LCD Info screen displaying useful information on the status of work and other telemetry data, and the display of which is controlled from the RGB Fusion 2.0 software.
Design
The Gigabyte AORUS GeForce RTX 3070 MASTER 8G has dimension of 290 x 131 x 60 millimeters. It comes with a 1,875MHz boost clock, a very nice 105MHz increase over the FE, and to deliver the necessary juice it sports one 6-pin and two 8-pin power connectors, dual BIOS and as you’d expect, lashings of RGB lighting.
Ports
It also packs in no less than six display outputs, of which you can use any four at once. These are 3x DP 1.4a, two HDMI 2.1 and a single HDMI 2.0 port. This opens up a wide range of connectivity options. For example you could connect a multi monitor setup, a big TV or a VR headset all at the same time.
LCD display
It features a black shroud with dark aluminum accents and dashes of RGB on the top and bottom of the card. Perhaps the most intriguing feature of the Master is the LCD display on the card’s edge. The LCD can display a multitude of things, including temperature data from the CPU and GPU, custom text, or a custom image/GIF.
Dual BIOS
The card has a Dual BIOS option in the form of a microswitch that changes the mode from standard OC mode to “Silent” when the maximum value of the fan speed is limited, which makes the graphics card even quieter. Practically, this is the difference between 36dB and 30 dB with how much is advertised in the “quiet” operating mode. A tribute to this is the increase in the temperature of the GPU processor during intensive work and gaming by approximately 5-7 C.
Boosting clock
Speaking of boost clocking, the excellent thermal performance of the cooler means the card is able to boost to very high levels. In fact, the card was able to hold a boost clock of 1,980Mhz after 10 minutes of load. There might be RTX 30-series cards that boost higher under stock conditions, but you can probably count them on one hand. The Aorus Master consistently ran 80MHz higher than a Founders Edition sample and an impressive 65MHz more than the MSI Gaming X, though the MSI was all but silent.
Cooling
The copper heat pipes in question are flattened in the part of the contact with the surface of the graphic processor through one large common copper cooler using which the surface of the video memory chips is also cooled at the same time.
Three 10 cm diameter fans with propeller design have been installed, which increase the aerodynamic pressure in the area of the cooling fins. The one in the middle rotates in the opposite direction to prevent turbulence and dust accumulation.
The card stops the fans in the idle, so it’s beautifully quiet, for example when playing video, the fans don’t spin until the GPU temperature rises to some 50 ° C, spinning at a low 1200 rpm and gradually accelerating.
Power consumption
The Aorus Master is consistently faster than the FE but at the cost of some 20w+ of additional power consumption. Once you start hitting 310W+ you’re getting near RTX 3080 territory, and that’s a much faster card. AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 remains a very competitive offering, but you can’t forget Nvidia’s strong feature set and ray tracing performance advantage.
Overlocking
The card had a lot of memory overclocking headroom, however. We were able to set the memory to 1,438MHz, an increase of 250MHz from the default 1,188MHz. This resulted in a bandwidth increase from the stock 608.3 GB/s to 736.3 GB/s. That’s over a 20% gain. Using Metro Exodus at 1440p as a test, the final OC result was 90.1 fps compared to the default result of 85.9 fps and the FE’s result of 84.0 fps.
GIGABYTE AORUS GeForce RTX 3070 Master 8G (REV2.0) graphics card Performance review
In terms of power with the GeForce RTX 2070 Super predecessor, the RTX 3070 Ampere is 30-40% faster on average in DirectX 12 and Ray Tracing titles. The good advantage and stock of frames provide an even better feeling of smooth animation in conjunction with G-Sync dynamic display synchronization on the newer generation of monitors.
In terms of performance, the Aorus GeForce RTX 3070 Master 8G is a gaming graphics card that we primarily recommend for 1080P monitors with high vertical refresh rates (144, 165, and 240 Hz) as well as 1440p models at 144Hz.
GIGABYTE AORUS GeForce RTX 3070 Master 8G (REV2.0) graphics card Customer review
Great Performer
The performance of this card is outstanding. I am able to play recent AAA games like COD:CW and CP2077 with DLSS at 4K at around 60 fps. Plays older games like Star Wars Battlefront 2, Borderlands 3, Just Cause 4, and FarCry 5 at 4k at ultra-settings above 60 fps. The 8GB of VRAM is rather limiting for future games at 4k but would be plenty for 1440p and 1080p for a long time. Temps are around 65C at max load and the fans are not that loud at all.The screen is a nice feature it is able to display your current temps, clock speed, etc. However, the default setting is their “Chibi Mode” and if you do not like that you have to change it with Gigabyte’s own RGBFusion2.0. RGBFusion2.0 has a reputation of being buggy and broken. It took a while for Gigabyte to release a version that would run on my computer. I eventually got it working but your millage may vary.
Overall great card if you are able to get one at MSRP.
By Mike at Best Buy
Alternate of GIGABYTE AORUS GeForce RTX 3070 Master 8G (REV2.0) graphics card
GeForce RTX 3090
Specs
GPU: Ampere (GA102)GPU Cores: 10496Boost Clock: 1,695 MHzVideo RAM: 24GB GDDR6X 19.5 GbpsTDP: 350 watts
Pros
+The fastest GPU, period+4K and maybe even 8K gaming+24GB is great for content creation workloads+Up to 30% faster than 3080 in professional apps
Cons
-Over twice the cost of 3080 for 10-15% more performance-Extremely limited availability for now-High power requirements-Titan price without Titan enhancementsAdvertisement
For some, the best card is the fastest card — pricing be damned! Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 caters to this category of user. At more than double the price of the RTX 3080, performance is only moderately better (10-15%) in most workloads. It’s basically a replacement for the Titan RTX, at a still extreme price. Which is fine if that’s what you’re after — the 12GB RTX 3080 Ti doesn’t reduce the price enough to shake things up.
The RTX 3090 is likely to reign as Nvidia’s top GPU for a while as well. It sports nearly a complete GA102 chip, based off the Ampere architecture, so there’s not really room for a new Titan card. Nvidia has said as much as well, that the 3090 brings Titan-class performance and features (specifically the 24GB VRAM) into the GeForce brand. If you simply must have the fastest graphics card available, that’s the RTX 3090. Current online prices tend to be more than $2,000, however, and the average eBay price last month was nearly $3,000, so be prepared to pay dearly for the privilege.
It’s not just about gaming, of course. The RTX 3090 is the only GeForce Ampere with NVLink support, which is arguably more useful for professional apps and GPU compute than SLI. The 24GB of GDDR6X memory is also helpful in a variety of content creation applications. Blender for example frequently showed 30% higher performance compared to the 3080, and over twice the performance of the Titan RTX. Just watch out for lower than expected performance in some of the SPECviewperf 13 apps, where Titan RTX has additional features turned on in its drivers that aren’t enabled for GeForce cards.
AMD’s RX 6900 XT challenges the RTX 3090, and in traditional rasterization it’s competitive. It also gets some wins in a few SPECviewperf tests. But if you want the absolute fastest graphics card right now, Nvidia wins, especially if you run games with ray tracing and DLSS enabled. The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti will launch at the end of this month, however, and should lay claim to the performance crown thanks to higher clocks and more GPU cores.
Editor’s recommendations
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- EVGA GeForce RTX 3070 XC3 ultra gaming 08G-P5-3755-KL 8GB GDDR6 review
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