GALAX GeForce RTX 3070 SG
29th, October, 2020Type
Graphics CardPrice
$499.99 USConclusion - Does The Fourth Fan Makes A Difference?
Coming to the conclusion, NVIDIA has a very strong contender in the $499 US this time around and one that actually delivers better performance than the last generation flagship. Gamers can expect faster performance, lower temperatures and lower power consumption, all that are worthy of title this card as one of the best gaming offerings this generation.
The GALAX GeForce RTX 3070 SG comes with a heavily updated cooling and shroud design versus the previous generation offerings along with a nifty list of features that make it a very interesting graphics card in the wide RTX 3070 AIB market.
The GALAX SG triple-fan cooler does a great job keeping the card under the low 60's and the added features such as 0db fan technology, a nicely build shroud with backplate and the cool RGB features are all an added bonus. GALAX has stated that the pricing should either be the same or close to the Founders Edition model at $499 US which is the most significant part. In case of the former, the graphics card may just offer better performance and better cooling than the FE model.
The GALAX RTX 3070 comes with a few added bonuses such as a 1-clip fan booster which does reduce temps by around 3-4C but you'd have to make sure that you can equip the card in your chassis as it can get things crammed up inside. The RGB support stick is a great addition and I found GALAX's four-pin cable positioning at the back of the shroud quite interesting. The main issue I had with the RTX 3070 SG was its 5 MHz lower clock than the FE variant and while it does come with a 1-click boost feature, you have to install the Xtreme Tuner app to unlock the extra 15 MHz clock which is quite unnecessary.
The RTX 3070 is based on the GA104 GPU which unlike the TU106 GPU is a much denser graphics chip and one that requires a lot of power, even for a 70 class GeForce product. The GeForce RTX 3070 SG does end up consuming slightly more power than the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 SUPER custom designs but at the end of the day, its no where near the same levels as the RTX 2080 Ti which is a big bonus. The updated ray tracing cores also deliver a wider performance difference between the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 3070 with Ampere clearly being ahead.
One big limiting factor for the graphics card is its 8 GB GDDR6 memory buffer. Now while the RTX 3070 SG Trio delivers exceptional performance at 1440p and 4K resolutions that sometimes outperforms and mostly matches the RTX 2080 Ti, there can be certain dips in minimums at higher resolutions such as 4K. It should've been better if the RTX 3070 had a similar memory capacity as the RTX 3080 which should've been a more balanced design for this graphics card.
However, while I will call the GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card as the best graphics card for gamers available right now, I won't set it in the stone as AMD has just announced its own $579 US Radeon RX 6800 graphics card which is said to offer performance faster than the RTX 2080 Ti, will feature ray-tracing support and will carry an impressive 16 GB GDDR6 frame buffer. The RX 6800 will be a real challenger for the GeForce RTX 3070 and since the launch of the RX 6800 is just a few weeks away (18th November), I would advise readers to wait to see reviews on that before jumping over to purchase a RTX 3070 graphics card.
Overall, if the GALAX GeForce RTX 3070 SG can come in around a price close to $499 US, it is a decent graphics card with some interesting features. If you're into a RGB riddled design with a great cooling design, than it seems like the SG is the card for you!