Card Layout and Photos
If you took a look at my review of the Asus Prime RTX 5070 Ti that I published just yesterday you already have a good idea of what the Prime RTX 5070 looks like. The two cards look the same and I wouldn’t say that is a bad thing. It’s not flashy or over the top and there isn’t any lighting or other “gamer” features which end the end makes for a nice relatively simple card design. It has a black plastic fan shroud for the triple fan design and it wraps around the top with a radiused corner. The shroud has a textured finish and then they use a glossy finish on some of the corners for contrast. There are a couple of spots molded into the shroud for accent including the Asus logo which is tucked under the left two cards. Beyond that, they have a few white lines, similar to what they used on the box and what you will see later that is on the back of the card. The card itself is a little larger than your “standard’ card but these days that standard is getting larger. It is 126 mm tall which puts it around 22mm over the top of the PCI bracket and 50 mm thick making it a 2 ½ slot card. It is then 304 mm long. For comparison, the Founders Edition is 30 mm thick, 252 mm long, and 112 mm tall.
The Prime RTX 5070 is a triple fan cooler with each fan being 87mm tip to tip. Given the extra height I would have thought these would be a little larger than the fans used on the Founders Edition but to fit three fans they are a little smaller. Each fan has 11 blades and the center hub is a little more compact giving a little more blade surface area. Each fan has an outer ring to help direct the airflow down into the card and also give more stability as well. The fans are set to turn off in light gaming and when the GPU isn’t being used. The fans also have the same dual-ball bearings that the last few Asus cards have had. The center fan here does spin in the opposite direction which helps cut down on turbulence and noise. Going clockwise (where the other two go counterclockwise) means on the right and left sides where it is next to another fan it will now go the same direction (down on the right side and up on the left side). The far-right fan is also a blow-through fan with the PCB ending and the back of the Prime allowing for the air to blow out the back. Looking down into the heatsink itself it is an aluminum fin design and horizontal which means for two of the three fans the air being pushed down into the heatsink will vent out of the top and bottom of the card.
The top edge of the Prime RTX 5070 has a few different things going on. They have the front edge which curves around to the top of the shroud, it has the Prime logo in it with a gloss black finish. Then just above that they have the Asus logo as well which is printed on a small section of the aluminum backplate that bends around to the top. There is also the power connection, the Prime RTX 5070 has a 12x6 power connection that uses a 12VHPWR cable, just like the Founders Edition. This plug however isn’t recessed down as far as on the Founders Edition and isn’t angled. It is 11 mm down from the top edge of the card which does help and while the card is taller it isn’t anywhere near the tallest card so in most cases there should be room for the connection. But I would still prefer to see this angled in a way where you don’t have to worry about the connection being strained. Asus also has a status LED on the PCB here that lights up if the plug isn’t getting power which is a nice diagnostic tool and hopefully will also give warning if the connection isn’t plugged in all the way.
With the top and bottom edges as well as the end of the Prime RTX 5070 we can get a better look at the cool design. Asus has done a good job tucking the heatsink in anywhere they can, even under the power plug you can see that it drops down in that area as well. It even jumps up into the vent areas on the top and bottom to get the most surface area possible. The end of the card has stripes and doesn’t have any venting with just the three threaded support bracket holes. On the bottom, we can see the fan plug hidden away. We can also see the heatspreader that sits on top of the GPU and memory. Asus calls the finish they used their Max Contact Design which expands the surface area by 5%. They also use a phase change thermal pad for the GPU rather than thermal paste with the idea being better contact and it won’t eventually dry out and need replacing like thermal paste.
The back of the Prime RTX 5070 has a full-length aluminum backplate including going down past the end of the PCB and giving support in the blow-through end of the card. You can see how it attaches to the heatsink to keep it stable down there. The backplate is black but has two different finishes, on the blow-through section it has a textured to it then on the right side it is brushed. They use white lines to break it up and to add in a few other accents. It has the Prime branding hidden down in the end and the GeForce RTX branding is printed there as well. The backplate has thermal pads that help pull heat out from the back of the PCB. Up on the top edge, there are two notched areas, one for the power connection and the other is smaller but gives access to the BIOS switch to switch between performance and quiet profiles. The serial number tag is on the back as well and they have the backplate cut around the support bracket behind the GPU. That support bracket has a nice flat black finish which is a nice touch as well.
For display connections, the Prime RTX 5070 has the same connection configuration that the Founders Edition has. You get three DisplayPorts and then one HDMI with the HDMi being down towards the bottom. They all run along the PCB leaving a lot of extra room on the PCI bracket and Asus did include vents in the bracket but you can see that the cooler itself has the fan shroud over that area so there isn’t any air being pushed out the vents. I would prefer the bracket to be blacked out to match the card and look better in a lot of cases. It does have a metal finish and Asus has each of the connections labeled. They also have it etched on there that this is Stainless Steel 304 which just means they are using a better quality material for the bracket to get better support for the card that you will see on some other cards.
Getting the Prime RTX 5070 next to the Founders Edition shows the size difference between the two. The Prime RTX 5070 is bigger in each dimension but its length is what stands out here.
For those curious, I did also put the Prime RTX 5070 next to the Prime RTX 5070 Ti. The fan shroud design is the same and both cards have the same length. But there was one difference that surprised me. Even when I took the pictures I just thought they were the same, but if you look closely you will notice that the power connection has moved down. The PCB for the Prime RTX 5070 Ti is longer. With that, the cooler design has changed as well.
