Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super review: The best mainstream GPU got better

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super Founder’s Edition is one of the best graphics cards you can buy today, bringing the best bang for your buck in gaming. It is a great GPU for 1440p or 1080p gaming and can even provide an enjoyable experience at 4K resolution with some settings turned down. Its relatively small cooling solution is still capable of keeping temperatures in check with minimal noise, and the two-slot design won’t cover up the second x16 PCIe slot on motherboards that use a three-slot spacing.

Nvidia normally replaces the existing card in the lineup with the mid-cycle Super refresh, but this time something different is happening. The RTX 4070 is still staying in the lineup but gets a permanent price cut to $549, so the new RTX 4070 Super has the same MSRP as the older card. That means the Super variant has to bring enough power to still be as great a value as the RTX 4070 already was. And it does, giving upgraders or first-time builders a head-scratching decision between the two cards, but one that ultimately will still be value-packed.

About this review: Nvidia provided us with the RTX 4070 Super Founders Edition for review. It did not have any input on the contents of this article.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super FE

Great value for 1440p gamers

Beats the RTX 4070 while being the same launch MSRP

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super gets a Founder’s Edition treatment with a twist. Gone are the silver accents of the original, replaced with an all-black look that stealthily puts out high frame rates in resolutions up to 1440p.

Pros

• Solid performance for QHD gaming
• Small enough for SFF builds
• Quiet fans and an overbuilt heatsink keep things cool

Cons

• 12VHPWR socket needs an unwieldy adapter or a new PSU

Price and availability

The Founder’s Edition reference version of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super was launched on January 8, 2024. It went on sale on January 17, and you can only get one directly from Nvidia or from its retail partner, Best Buy. It carries an MSRP of $599, so it’s launching at the same price that the RTX 4070 came in at.

Unlike the RTX 4070 Ti Super and RTX 4080 Super that recently launched, the RTX 4070 Super isn’t replacing the RTX 4070. Instead, the older card is getting a permanent $50 price cut at retail. Nvidia’s AIB partners will have variants of both the RTX 4070 Super and the RTX 4070 with their own twists on cooling solutions.

Design and features

Founder’s Edition gets the blacked-out treatment

This is the second card in the mid-cycle refresh for Nvidia’s 40-series to get the Founder’s Edition treatment, with the other being the RTX 4080 Super, which we reviewed recently. The smallest of the Super cards, the RTX 4070 Super, looks very much like the existing RTX 4070 Founder’s Edition. It features a very well-built heatsink with one fan on either side of the PCB that is designed to pull in cooler air and exhaust hot air out the rear of your case via the I/O shield. That I/O shield also features one HDMI 2.1 port and three DisplayPort 1.4 ports, capable of running the latest 4K monitors at 240Hz or even an 8K panel at 60Hz if you have one of those.

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All of Nvidia’s first-party cooler designs are top-notch, using large metal heatsinks clad in more metal. This helps their cooling performance, but it does make for a heavy graphics card. Even so, there isn’t a hint of droop or flex once installed in a PCIe slot, which says volumes about Nvidia’s manufacturing partner and the design of the Founder’s Editions. Mercifully, in this age of chunky graphics cards, the RTX 4070 Super is a two-slot design, so on standard ATX motherboards, you can still use the second x16 PCIe slot for other devices. With many other graphics cards covering this slot, it’s nice to have options again.

The design of the FE cards is one of my favorites of recent years, and it changes ever so slightly on the RTX 4070 Super. Instead of the silver piping in the squared-off infinity symbol, Nvidia replaced it with black, giving this GPU a stealthy look. To continue that stealth, you don’t even get any LED lighting, with the white backlit logo being reserved for the RTX 4080 Super. The fit and finish are impeccable, with only exposed PCB around the PCIe tab and no visible cables or even many screw heads.

The smaller size means it’ll fit in almost any case, from gigantic full-towers to small form-factor shoeboxes and everything in between. Perhaps a suitably minimalist PC case to match the understated style of the FE cooler would be a worthy pairing. As with most of the 40-series, Nvidia uses a single 12-pin PCIe 5 connector on this graphics card. That means you might want to think about upgrading to an ATX 3.0 power supply, with a wattage of between 650W and 750W to suit the RTX 4070 Super’s power requirements. Otherwise, Nvidia includes an adapter that takes two 8-pin PCIe cables from your PSU and combines them into one 12-pin plug.

Performance

Great for 1080p or 1440p monitors

Nvidia gives the RTX 4070 Super a hefty boost in CUDA cores over the base RTX 4070. That translates to nearly a 22% increase, or 1,280 extra CUDA cores to crunch numbers for your games and other tasks. That’s a big improvement and gets close to the 7,680 maximum cores that the AD104 silicon can come with. Remember, that’s the number of cores that the RTX 4070 Ti came with, so you’re almost getting an upgrade to the higher tier of card. You also get a boosted cache of 48MB, up from 36MB, and a slightly higher TGP of 220W.

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Otherwise, this card is unchanged from the RTX 4070. It still has 3rd-gen RT cores, 4th-gen Tensor cores, DLSS 3.5 support with Frame Generation, and the 8th-gen NVENC encoder that can support AV1. It has the same 192-bit memory bus and 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM, which could become an issue in the future as games start to require more complicated textures to be loaded into memory, but it didn’t cause any issues with the games I tested.

I tested the RTX 4070 Super FE on an open-air test bench with an Intel i9-12900K processor installed on an MSI MEG Z690 UNIFY-X motherboard with 64GB of DDR5-5600 RAM and a 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD for both the operating system and games. Testing was done on the in-game benchmarking tools wherever possible or on the same section of the game if there wasn’t an inbuilt tool.

I used the included adapter with two 8-pin PCIe cables, as that is the solution most upgraders will likely use. I didn’t have any power draw issues using the adapter.

Benchmarking began with some synthetic tests in 3DMark’s testing suite. These aim to simulate gaming at 1440p and 4K and are structured to enable comparison between differing GPU generations and architecture. The RTX 4070 Super FE performed admirably and even beat out one of its AIB siblings.

Looking closer at the 3DMark test results, the Time Spy scores show that the Founder’s Edition card scores higher than the custom Zotac RTX 4070 Super and gets within striking range of MSI’s variant of the RTX 4070 Ti Super. I wasn’t expecting that to be the case, as the customized AIB cards are usually overclocked and perform higher than Nvidia’s own offerings.

It’s worth mentioning that the performance and rankings from synthetic testing don’t always translate to real-world results. Different game engines behave in different ways when testing, and sometimes results can be flat or even backwards from what is expected. The RTX 4070 Super FE did perform as expected in the titles that I tested it in, and what really surprised me was the evolution of DLSS and Frame Generation, which delivered impressive performance increases for no noticeable additional power usage or heat output.

We used the same group of recent games that we usually do, with support for technologies like native ray tracing, DLSS, and/or Frame Generation. The benefits to gamers that DLSS and Frame Generation bring, especially for single-player experiences, are impressive. Without these turned on, the system-taxing Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty crawled along at 20FPS at 4K resolution. Once the switches for DLSS and Frame Generation were flicked on, that became 83FPS, which was not only playable but enjoyable as well.

The story was the same no matter which title was tested. Even in games that run at high frame rates at lower resolutions, adding DLSS and/or Frame Generation resulted in huge boosts. What’s even more impressive is that the numbers aren’t that far off the RTX 4080 Super, which costs another $400. It’s no small feat and really serves to hammer home how much value is packed into the RTX 4070 Super.

When we tested the RTX 4070, we found Cyberpunk 2077 ran 40 FPS at 1440p resolution with the same mix of Ultra setting and ray-tracing. That means you’re getting ten percent more frames with the RTX 4070 Super for the same price. The RTX 4070 could barely even render the game at 4K resolution with the same settings, with a paltry 5 FPS. Sure, 20 FPS isn’t much, but it’s playable. Turning DLSS on quadrupled the frame rate for both cards, but then you get 20FPS for the older one and a smooth 83FPS for the Super variant. When was the last time any refresh or generational leap for graphics cards gave you that kind of upgrade without a price increase? Certainly not in recent memory.

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The RTX 4070 Super is a supremely capable card at 1440p resolutions and below, and that’s before taking into account Nvidia’s technology stack for super-sampling and AI generation. And like the other 40-series graphics cards, it’s hard to overstate how much of an impact DLSS has, and how far it has come since its inception. 4K gaming used to be the province of those who could afford the flagship graphics cards. Now it’s an option for mid-tier gamers, once DLSS is turned on and Frame Generation is enabled in titles that support it.

Temperatures and fan noise

What noise?

While testing, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super FE was installed on an open-air test bench from DimasTech, the Easy V3.0, which is a solid bench with space for E-ATX motherboards and side panels that could accommodate a 360mm water-cooling radiator if desired. It was operated in a room with an ambient temperature of 22 Celsius. While playing, the highest core temperature I recorded was 66.8C, which peaked only towards the end of my benchmarking session with in-game resolutions of 4K. While gaming at 1080p, it was only 62.1C, and during desktop tasks like browsing or typing in documents, it was in the mid-30s.

Nvidia makes the best reference coolers I’ve used, capable of near-silent operation while keeping thermals in check. The RTX 4070 Super continues this trend with a heavy all-metal heatsink, with two large fans pushing air across the thermal solution and exhausting out of the case from the I/O panel. It might not be as large or heavy as the one in the RTX 4080 Super FE, but it’s every bit as capable and has a lower TDP to dissipate.

Unlike the fans on most AIB boards, which have a zero RPM mode until the GPU core hits a certain temperature, the Founder’s Edition fans were always spinning. That’s okay, as they’re whisper-quiet, especially at lower speeds, and the CPU tower cooler’s fans were more audible while I did my testing. In an enclosed PC case, you probably won’t even know they’re on, going a long way to making your PC quieter overall.

Should you buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super Founder’s Edition?

You should buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super if:

• You play at 1080p or 1440p and want high frame rates.
• You want to use real-time ray tracing in supported titles.
• You want the best bang for your buck in today’s graphics card market.

You shouldn’t buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super if:

• You want RGB or a flashy cooler design on your PC.
• You want to play everything at 4K resolution on high settings.
• You want the best performance, regardless of price.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super FE is one of the best graphics cards for gaming you can buy. It takes the core from the RTX 4070, which is already the best bang for the buck GPU on the market, and adds more for the same MSRP. The Founder’s Edition cooling solution looks great and keeps temperatures low without appreciable fan noise, and it’s small enough to fit in almost any PC chassis. Even the most demanding titles, like Alan Wake 2, ran smoothly and gave an enjoyable gaming experience.

Throwing DLSS and Frame Generation into the mix means that 4K gaming is possible, even without having to turn down any in-game settings to compromise on visuals. It’s a testament to Nvidia’s generational improvements in its super-sampling technology that any loss of visual fidelity is barely noticeable while gaming. Match this card with a capable mid-tier AMD or Intel CPU, and explore some virtual worlds — you’ll have a blast.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super FE

Great value for 1440p gamers

Beats the RTX 4070 while being the same launch MSRP

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super gets a Founder’s Edition treatment with a twist. Gone are the silver accents of the originals, replaced with an all-black look that stealthily puts out high frame rates in resolutions up to 1440p.