Overall and Final Verdict

As I mentioned before, Zotac went their own way when it came to the styling and cooler design on the 4070 Amp Airo and I love it. Everyone else has been going with sharp edges and the angular styling and they changed it up with the cooler on the Airo being completely rounded off on the ends, both with the fan shroud and the backplate as well. The accents follow the same theme and look great and are simple and clean and I even dig the colors which are a little crazy. It is of course mostly grey, black, and has some silver on the back. But the gold centers on the fans are a departure but look good and I like the holographic-like light bar across the top which has a purple finish when not lit up. For lighting the 4070 Amp Airo has that light bar which does have Zotac branding hidden behind the purple finish that you see when you light it up and one stripe on the end of the card. I’m never a big fan of lighting featuring branding because it can make your PC feel like times square, but this was at least different and looks good. The card is big especially when we put it next to the Founders Edition RTX 4070 but even the Ventus which has a triple fan cooler looks a little smaller with the 4070 Amp Airo being a lot thicker, Zotac calls it s 2.5 slot design but it is about as close to 3 slots as you can get without being the full three slots. They used that space well however, the heatsink on this thing is beefy and thick. You can feel it in weight alone when you handle the card.

For performance it was the cooler that impressed me the most, the 4070 Amp Airo ran cool in our tests, and when using the stock fan profile it was both cool and quiet sitting at or near the bottom of our charts on both. The fans were also running at the second lowest percentage of all of the cards tested as well when under that load meaning there is still headroom left if needed. When you crank the fans up to 100% the triple fan design does get loud, but it wasn’t the loudest tested, and frankly given the cooling performance I don’t know why you would want to turn them up that high. Another surprising aspect was the power efficiency of the card. The 4070 Amp Airo is overclocked and typically that also means that power usage is going to be a lot higher than the Founders Edition design but it was just 2 watts higher on the overall average of all of the power tests done but for the peak power it was down 12 watts which is impressive. This meant it did especially well in our score per watt test which the 4070 Founders Edition already did well in, but the 4070 Amp Airo blew it out of the water.

The overclock wasn’t significant at just 60 MHz but that combined with the cooling/power performance the 4070 Amp Airo was consistently running 1-1.7% higher than the RTX 4070 Founders Edition and it was consistent. Without a doubt, the 4070 Amp Airo is the best of the three RTX 4070s that I’ve tested.

Of course, we do have to consider more than just the other 4070s, we have to look at how it performed against the competition and Nvidias older cards as well. Like with the other 4070s, I was impressed when comparing the 4070 Amp Airo to the RTX 3080 where is outperformed it at 1080p and 1440p with the 3080 still winning out at 4K. But like I mentioned in the other 4070 coverage, pricing combined with AMDs lowered prices on their last-gen cards complicates things. This is made even worse with the price of the Zotac RTX 4070 Amp Airo which has an MSRP of $669.99, $70 more than the base MSRP of the RTX 4070. It’s the raster performance of the AMD 6800 XT and the 6950 XT which was consistently higher and their discounted prices which you can get a 6800 XT for $539 and the 6950 XT for $639. The RTX 4070 makes up a lot of ground when you also start to take into account its ray tracing performance and the benefits of DLSS 3 which can give crazy performance improvements in the games that support it (which that list has been growing quickly). But especially with the higher price of the 4070 Amp Airo, I don’t think it's enough to make up the difference. Now those older cards most likely won’t be in stock forever and discounted prices like that don’t always stick around past launches if you know what I mean so it is all dependent on those things. In the future, the 4070’s value will most likely change and the 4070 Amp Airo’s performance was impressive. So keep a close eye on those prices before you make your decision.

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Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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