Card Layout and Photos
So like the RTX 4070 Ti, the RTX 5070 Ti doesn’t have a Founders Edition card available and Nvidia sent over an Asus stock-clocked RTX 5070 Ti, specifically the Asus Prime RTX 5070 Ti. Asus’s Prime lineup is what they consider their mainstream performance lineup with their Dual line sitting below it with dual fan coolers. The Prime RTX 5070 Ti has a triple fan cooler design and an all-plastic fan shroud that helps keep costs down. The shroud on this specific card is a simple design with it being flat on the fan side and a rounded corner as it wraps up onto the top of the card. Asus uses white lines to add some flavor to the card and the Prime branding is on the rounded corner molded into the shroud. It has no lighting or special features, keeping things simple and to the point. The card is 304 mm long, 126 mm tall, and 50 mm thick. The 50 mm thickness puts it as a two-and-a-half slot design which is compact for an aftermarket card these days. For length, it is the same length as this generation's Founders Edition cards which if you compared that to cards from a few generations ago wouldn’t be considered small, but these days is on the lower end for an aftermarket card. The 126 mm height does mean the Prime RTX 5070 Ti is taller than a “standard” PCI card with 20 mm up over the top of the bracket but again this is short compared to modern cards with the RTX 5080 Founders Edition being 10 mm taller even. Overall, for a modern card, this is what they consider SFF ready and Asus even has that listed on their website.
The Prime RTX 5070 Ti has a triple axial fan cooler design with three similar but not matching fans all blowing down into the cooler. The heatsink below has a horizontal layout that pushes the air across the cooler and up or down and out of the card. Each of the fans has 11 fan blades and each blade connects with the outer ring that helps give them all strength. The two outer fans spin counterclockwise whereas the center fan spins clockwise. This design helps keep the noise down because it cuts down on the turbulence created near where the fans are close together. It does this by having the fans pushing air in the same direction at those edges. These fans do have what Asus calls 0dB technology which turns the fans off anytime the GPU is below 50c to keep things silent with light use. The fans also have dual ball bearings. The far right fan area of the cooler is a blow-through design.
Up on the top edge, you can get a better look at how the fan shroud has a radiused corner and wraps up onto the top of the card. Part of that rounded edge is used to feature the Prime brand name which is debossed into the plastic. It has a gloss finish that stands out against the textured finish of the rest of the fan shroud. The Asus branding is also there but smaller, printed on a portion of the rear backplate that wraps around on that same end. Closer to the PCI bracket they also have the GeForce RTX branding which Nvidia must push companies to use. I would much rather see RTX 5070 Ti in that same spot, showing off the actual model. Anyhow this is printed on the shroud in silver. Also on the top of the Prime RTX 5070 Ti is its power connection. It has a single 16-pin connection but I’m unsure if this is a 12VHPWR or the new 12V-2x6 connection. They are so similar and Asus’s website doesn’t specify. The connection is recessed down into the card with the PCB and the cooler all sitting higher. It is at the end of the PCB 2/3 towards the end of the card. It does point directly up which when combined with the included adapter can be a tight turn in a lot of cases, I would rather see this angled like how Nvidia has switched to on the Founders Edition cards but being recessed down into the card does help at least.
Looking around at the edges gives us a little more information about the cooling on the Prime RTX 5070 Ti as well. The top edge for example has the fan shroud wrapped around at three points but has two large open areas to allow for the air to flow out. The connection at the middle is right where the heatpipes most around and there aren’t any heatsinks so it isn’t blocking airflow at all. We can also see the heatplate sitting over the GPU from the top and bottom views which combined with the rear bracket is sandwiching the GPU and the PCB to help keep things flat there. Asus also uses glue on the corners of the GPU for the same reason. That is a main failure point and it's good to see them doing that on all of their video cards. The bottom view of the card has the same large airflow openings. This does mean that a lot of air will be blowing down under the card, near where a lot of motherboards have their M.2 slots so keep that In mind and make sure your case will have airflow to keep that from being a hotspot. Then at the end of the card, the fan shroud has this end covered up with a grooved design. It does have three threaded holes designed into it for use with some support brackets used in servers and every once in a while in some PC cases.
For display connections, the Prime RTX 5070 Ti has four in total with three of them being DisplayPorts. The last one is down at the bottom and is HDMI. While the card is a 2-and-a-half slot the bracket here is a 2-slot bracket and the connections only run along the PCB so there is a lot of extra space used for a large vent. The cooler doesn’t vent in this direction, in fact, we can see the fan shroud blocking most of the vents off but this is a standard bracket design. Asus does have this labeled at 304 stainless steel and I had to ask them a while back why that was important enough to note. They are going with the upgraded 304 stainless to give the bracket a little more strength to help hold heavy cards long term. The bracket has a slight tint to it but is the stainless finish. I always would prefer a black bracket, but especially here with so much black used in the card design. It would match and when installed it will match most cases better as well.
The back of the Prime RTX 5070 Ti does have a full-length metal backplate. What I found interesting though is the unique blend of the black brushed aluminum finish that runs to under the power connection then the rest is painted with a slightly textured black. The same lines we saw on the fan shroud are on the backplate along with the GeForce RTX branding which is parallel to the rear bracket, something you don’t normally see. When the PCB ends the Prime RTX 5070 Ti does have that blow-through section of the cooler and the backplate has a large hole there to get the best possible airflow. The Prime brand is printed in a glossy black on the textured black so it is visible only in the right light. Up on the top edge at the power connection, the backplate is cut out around that and farther over there is a second cutout, this time for the mode switch that changes between quiet and performance modes. The backplate does have a cutout around the back of the GPU leaving that exposed which is better for cooling but worse for card protection. Beyond that, there is a sticker with the model information and your serial number back here.
