I took a look at the Asus Prime RTX 5070 Ti ahead of the new RTX 5070 Ti’s hitting stores. The Prime model that I took a look at is a stock-clocked card. Well, I was lucky enough to end up with a second Asus RTX 5070 Ti, Asus themselves sent over their TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti and this one is overclocked. Typically, especially anytime near a launch getting your hands on a stock-clocked “MSRP” card can be impossible. You are a lot more likely to get an overclocked card like this one so this will be a better look at what you might experience. I’m curious to see what sets the TUF Gaming model apart from the Prime and to put it to the test in our test suite, so let’s dive in.
Product Name: Asus TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC
Review Sample Provided by: Asus
Written by: Wes Compton
Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE
What is new?
Nvidia announced a lot with this one so let’s try to touch on as much as we can. They of course had a few hardware announcements for the 50-Series. They have announced four cards, the RTX 5090, the RTX 5080, the RTX 5070 Ti, and the RTX 5070. That is the new 50-series RTX family. The slides below include their focus on them. The 5090 for example is targeted at 4k 240 Hz and the other three are targeted at 2k or 1440p performance. They all have GDDR7 VRAM with the flagship RTX 5090 having 32 GB and a 512-bit interface. The RTX 5080 cuts that in half to 16 GB, the RTX 5070 Ti also has 16GB, and then the RTX 5070 has 12 GB.
The new GPUs are based on the Blackwell architecture and they do have new updated RT and Tensor cores with that being the 4th gen for the RT Cores and 5th gen for Tensor cores. The new tensor cores can now also handle floating point (FP) 4 along with FP8 and FP16. They also have introduced an AMP processer which is the AI Management Processor to help schedule AI tasks alongside of graphics rendering. They have increased the number of NV encoders and decoders, it now depends on the card model and isn’t a flat number of them across the entire generation of cards. They have also moved to PCIe Gen 5 and DisplayPort 2.1b including UHBR20. For pricing the RTX 5090 comes in at $1999, the RTX 5090 is half that (just like its memory) at $999. The RTX 5070 Ti is $749 and the RTX 5070 is $549.
Some of the main goals with Blackwell were to optimize the neural workloads and reduce the memory footprint. No big surprises there. Memory is one of the more expensive parts of the cards and anyone who has been paying attention knows that neural workloads and AI have been where Nvidia has been seeing the biggest improvements. Combining those things they have brought AI into shaders with neural shaders. The example of this they show is a hair being rendered with ray tracing and how using spheres rather than triangles helps use less data which means less VRAM and higher frame rates.
Nvidia announced Transformer which replaces CNN as the model they use with Super Resolution. They have improved the design significantly to get better detail when scaling this up. On top of that, they announced DLSS 4 which has improved on the frame generation that they introduced with DLSS 3. It is now Multi Frame Generation. Where before they were able to generate every other frame, they can now do x3 or x4. This gets interesting once they add in DLSS Super Resolution as well because that is already rendering ¾ of the image. With both, they are rendering 15 of 16 pixels using AI. Of course how well this works then depends a lot on how good the renders are. But it gives huge improvements in performance and with frame generation, we know that those improvements still happen even if you are PCU limited for example. The example they show has DLSS off at 27 FPS, turning on Super Resolution it goes to 71 FPS. DLSS 3.5 gets you to 140 FPS and DLSS 4 is 248 FPS. DLSS is already supported by a LOT of games and Nvidia is saying that DLSS 4 will have 75 games and apps supporting DLSS 4 at Day 0. Some of those will be by using the Nvidia App, which can override the DLSS settings on some games. It is also important to note that some of these features will go back and work with legacy cards as well. Specifically, DLAA is going to work back to the 20 series of cards, same with the improved DLSS Super Resolution. The new multi-frame generation however only works with 50 series cards.
They also introduced a new Nvidia Reflex. Reflex helps improve responsiveness to get lower latency through the entire pipeline. Were Reflex offered 50% faster responsiveness the new Reflex 2 gets you 75% by using frame warp. They say that is coming first to 50 series and will be available in games like Valorant soon.
The RTX 5070 Ti is running the same GB203 GPU as we saw with the RTX 5080 but the 5070 Ti isn’t utilizing the full GPU. When it comes to the GPCs the 5080 had 7 and the 5070 Ti has 6. TPCs go down from 42 to 35 and SMs go from 84 to 70. This is a little more than cutting out one GPC, if that was the case the SM count would be at 72, not 70. The CUDA core count per SM is still the same though and with 14 fewer SMs the RTX 5070 Ti has 8960 CUDA cores to the 10752 of the RTX 5080, a 16% drop. This is still a step up from the 7680 CUDA cores on the RTX 4070 Ti and even more compared to the RTX 3070 Ti which is more likely to be where people might be considering an upgrade. For the Tensor cores the RTX 5070 Ti has 280 to the 336 of the 5080. For comparison, the RTX 4070 Ti had 240 and the 3070 T had 192, that doesn’t also figure in the architecture improvements as well where the 3070 Ti has 3rd Gen Tensor cores, the 4070 Ti had 4th Gen and we are now on the 5th Gen. We see a similar thing with the ray tracing cores as well, the RTX 5070 Ti has 70 to the 84 of the RTX 5080 on the 4th Generation. The RTX 4070 Ti had 60 of the 3rd gen RT cores and the RTX 3070 Ti had 48 of the 2nd gen RT cores. You can see with Nvidia’s RTX TFLOPS numbers how big of an improvement that translates to going from 42.5 on the 3070 Ti up to 92.7 on the 4070 Ti and 133.2 on the new 5070 Ti.
For memory the RTX 5070 Ti has the same 16GB GDDR7 that the RTX 5080 has, this is a step up from the 12GB of GDDR6X on the RTX 4070 Ti and 8 GB of GDDR6X from the RTX 3070 Ti. The memory interface has been bumped back up as well from 192-bit up to 256-bit, just like what we saw on the RTX 5080. The memory bandwidth numbers show just how much that helped going from 504 GB/sec on the RTX 4070 Ti up to 896 GB/sec, the RTX 3070 Ti was a little better with its 256-bit interface but still, it’s a good step up. The base clock for the RTX 5070 Ti is 2452 MHz which is a little lower than the 2617 MHz of the RTX 5080. The RTX 5070 Ti has the upgraded NVENC and NVDEC video engines but there is just one NVDEC where the RTX 5080 has two. The RTX 5070 Ti has a TGP of 300 watts, 60 less than the RTX 5080 and 10 and 15 watts higher than the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 4070 Ti before it. Like with the other 50 Series GPUs, it is running on PCI Gen 5. Lastly, for pricing, the RTX 5070 Ti has an MSRP of $749, which is $50 less than the launch price on the RTX 4070 Ti but $150 more than the RTX 3070 Ti. Of course that pricing is for the stock-clocked MSRP-focused cards which can be hard or impossible to find post-launch.
Before getting into testing I also ran GPUz to double-check that our clock speeds match up with the specifications. The Asus Prime RTX 5070 Ti that I took a look at had a stock clock speed of 2452 MHz, todays TUF Gaming overclocked model on the other hand is running at 2588 MHz, it’s not a huge jump but 136 MHz isn’t nothing. I tested using the same 572.43 beta driver that Nvidia provided ahead of the launch. The BIOS is noted here as well, just in case that is needed in the future.
Packaging
The box for the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC starts with a black background with the TUF logo across it. It has a large picture of the card which is always great to see and above the card in the top left corner it has the Asus branding and a larger TUF Gaming logo to the right of the card. Along the bottom, it has the required Nvidia black and green wrap-around which has the GPU model in a huge font and a small list of Nvidia-specific features. Above that Asus has also included the VRAM size, an icon showing this has their Aura Sync support, and an OC badge letting us know the card is overclocked. The main downside to having the model number in the Nvidia wrap-around is that we don’t ever get the full model name altogether. This is the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC and all of that information is on the front, but you do have to look around to find it. The back of the box has a few more pictures of the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC including a line drawing of the rear I/O so you can see all of the display connections. I do wish there was a basic specification listing, especially with the card dimensions on here which would be helpful for anyone shopping in person though.
Once you pull the outer box off, there is a second box inside. This one is thicker is black with the TUF Gaming logo and a bunch of accents printed all across the top. Inside there is a thin layer of foam glued to the underside of the top of the box and then a thick foam tray inside cut to fit the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC and accessories as well. The card itself comes in a static protective bag in thick foam. The card also has plastic all over it once you pull it out to protect it from any scratches. Up under the card, you will also find a cutout with an envelope inside with all of the documentation.
For accessories, the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC comes with a few things more than the Prime 5070 Ti did. You get the same 12VHPWR power adapter cable and I do wish that this was like the one that Nvidia includes with the Founders Edition cards, the longer cable as well as the individually sleeved cables puts less strain on the connection. You get a larger TUF-branded Velcro strap. Then you also get a metal TUF Gaming logo-shaped badge and a small slide-out GPU support. It has a rubber bumper on the slide-out and TUF Gaming branding on both the support as well as the TUF logo on the screw that tightens it all down. For documentation, you get a quick start guide, a thank you card, and a piece of paper with drawings showing how to get the power connection correct.
Card Layout and Photos
The TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC is a triple fan design, similar to the 5070 Ti Prime that I already took a look at but the card design is significantly different other than that. Its design embraces the TUF Gaming look with thick rings around each fan and an aluminum shroud across the front of the card. The aluminum has a brushed finish in the black and strips of bare aluminum at the ends with rivet-like accents at the corners. It does still use plastic around the ends to wrap things around so it isn’t a full metal design but it is partially metal. It’s also very large at 348 mm for its length and 146 mm for its height. You can see that puts the card 34 mm up over the top of the PCI bracket. It’s also thick at 72 mm making it a 3 and a half slot card. The Prime wasn’t a compact card, but this sure makes it look compact in comparison.
For its fans, the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC has a similar but slightly different fan configuration when compared to the 5070 Ti Prime. It has a triple fan layout just like before and they have the same dual ball bearing design that helps extend their life. But the shape looks a little different, the Prime fans had a little change in their curve where these don’t and the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC has larger fans as well because of its larger height and length. They have the TUF logos on the centers and there is an outer ring that helps give them more stability as well. The center fan is also flipped around spinning in the other direction, this is a trick that a few brands use and I’m happy to see Asus also take advantage. With a triple fan design, it means the air blowing off of the fan on the left and right sides will match with the air from the two outer fans cutting down noise. The thicker card design uses axial fans to blow down into the heatsink which has a horizontal layout. Down at the end the last fan also blows through where the PCB is shorter than the card.
The top edge of the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC has a few things going on. For branding it has the GeForce RTX branding printed on it and then at the end of the card the TUF Gaming logo is there as well and backlit. I’m not the biggest fan of basic backlit branding, I would prefer the lighting to be unique accents that can look good in any system and the branding if you mix and match your brands will end up looking like Time Square. I would also prefer the GeForce RTX to be the actual model name, these are expensive cards why not show it off? Also on the top edge is the power connection. The TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC has one vertical facing 12x6 power connection, this is similar to the 12VHPWR only the connections are longer to ensure a better connection and the sense pins are shorter to pick up when there is an issue. Asus also runs an LED right at the plug to let you know if there is an issue. The connection is recessed slightly below the top height of the PCB but not very far down, given the card’s height and that this faces directly up you will need to be careful not to stress that connection, I would prefer if the plug was a little farther down or angled to help prevent that.
The back of the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC has a full-length metal backplate. It covers the full height of the PCB with just one notch down at the top near the power connection. There is some PCB exposed next to the power connection, that gives access to the BIOS switch which lets you switch between performance and quiet modes. The backplate has a cutout around the backplate for the GPU, the backplate itself has a nice black finish which is cool. Then at the far end of the card, you have the blow-through section of the cooler and the backplate does have a cutout for that including the TUF logo in the middle of the cutout. What I find the most interesting though is the art design on the backplate. The backplate itself has a grey finish then they have eight stripes printed on it with a dark grey outline and a light grey outline giving those stripes an embossed finish. This is simple but fits the TUF brand perfectly. They also have the TUF Gaming branding as well as the GeForce RTX branding printed on the back with the TUF being upside down so it is readable when installed in most cases. In regards to the opening for the bracket behind the GPU, that bracket along with glue on the corners of the GPU itself are ways that Asus is trying to prevent the cracks that can happen which cause cards to die.
Getting a look at the top, bottom, and ends of the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC also helps us get a better picture of Asus’s cooling design. The aluminum fin heatsink has a horizontal orientation pushing air to the top and bottom of the card which is why those areas are the most open. Even then the fan shroud does wrap around a lot more than you would expect. The end of the card has one opening and the backplate wraps around in one section with three threaded holes for use with some cases for stability. The bottom view we can see all of the fan and lighting connections. You can also see that there are two halves to the heatsink with Asus’s “MaxContact” heat spreader on the left over top of the GPU and the VRAM around the GPU. MaxContact gets a 5% improvement in contact with a flatter surface. They then use phase change thermal pads that melt and get better contact and when compared to thermal paste they say it is less likely to dry out which is an issue that eventually happens with thermal paste. They use six heat pipes that run the length of the card and three of those even wrap back around on the PCI bracket end of the card to pull heat up into the thicker heatsink. In the middle, you can see where the heatpipes shift up into the middle for the right half of the card including the blow-through section after the PCB ends. There isn’t any way to see it, but our review information on the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC also mentioned that the PCB has a protective coating on it, Asus is trying to prevent short circuits from moisture, dust, and debris using that.
For display connections, the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC has 5 in total which is a departure from what most other cards have. That extra port is up on the second row with the standard four connections along the PCB. You get three DisplayPort connections and then two HDMI, with one extra HDMI being the bonus connection. There was still room for some ventilation with a row of vents next to the HDMI port. The cooler design isn’t pushing air in this direction either way so cutting into the vents doesn’t take anything away. The PCI bracket is stainless steel 304 which Asus always notes because this is a little stronger than the average bracket. As always I would still prefer that to be finished in black to match more cases, but it does have a darker tint at least.
If you were curious how the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC compares to the Asus Prime RTX 5070 Ti that I took a look at the launch I do have pictures with them sitting together. The extra length and height of the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC is noticeable here. The thickness is most noticeable though, the Prime was still a 2 and a half slot but the extra thickness and height of the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC has it looking especially beefy with the two next to each other.
Before getting into testing I did also get a few pictures of the lighting on the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC. As I mentioned before, it's all focused around the TUF logo but I didn’t notice at the time that Asus has lit up the small accents around it and below it on the silver stripe as well. It’s not a lot of lighting, so if you don’t want your whole PC lit up this won’t be a problem, if you want crazy lighting on the other hand this isn’t enough to be what you want.
Test Rig and Procedures
Test System
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D – Live Pricing
Motherboard: ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero – Live Pricing
Cooling: Enermax LIQMAXFLO 360mm Liquid CPU Cooler - Live Pricing
Noctua NT-H2 Thermal Paste - Live Pricing
Memory: G.SKILL Trident Z5 Neo RGB Series (2x16GB) 6000MT/s CL28-36-36-96 – Live Pricing
Storage: Viper VP4300 Lite 4TB – Live Pricing
Power Supply: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 1600W- Live Pricing
Case: Primochill Wetbench - Live Pricing
OS: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit - Live Pricing
Synthetic Benchmarks
As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially when comparing with the same GPU. In this case, we took a look at the stock-clocked RTX 5070 Ti and today we get to see an overclocked card so I am curious how the overclock changes performance. So I will be focused a lot on how the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC compares to the Prime RTX 5070 Ti, that said we should still be keeping an eye on how it compares to the RTX 4080 and 4080 SUPER, the 3070 Ti, and both the 7900 XTX and XT from AMD.
The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC is a hair ahead of the Prime 5070 Ti in the Fire Strike test but that flips in the Fire Strike Extreme test. Then for the Fire Strike Ultra the overclock helps more with a noticeable gap between the two on that test. Outside of that, both cards are out in front of the RTX 4080 SUPER here but below the 7900 XTX.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. For these tests the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC does edge out in front of the stock-clocked Prime but with both tests, the performance difference is .6-.8% so it isn’t a significant difference. That was almost enough to pass the RTX 4080 in the Time Spy Extreme test but here we do see both 5070 Ti’s behind both the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 Ti.
I did also test using the new 3DMark Speed Way which is one of their latest benchmarks and Port Royal as well. Speed Way is DX12 as well but combines more future-focused tech like Ray Tracing which up until its release where only used in feature tests, not full benchmarks. The TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC is once again just a hair in front of the Prime with both tests giving the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC a .7% improvement. Both cards jump out ahead of the RTX 4080 SUPER here and by a good margin showing what I saw in our previous review once again. The 5070 Ti outperforms the 4080 SUPER in DX11 and in the ray tracing and DLSS-focused tests but comes in behind in the base DX12 tests.
The last test is the newer 3Dmark Steel Nomad benchmark. Officially this is the replacement for the Time Spy benchmark. It is a DX12 benchmark and doesn’t include ray tracing but is updated to better take advantage of modern cards. The overclock on the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC helps a lot more here with a 2.7% improvement over the Prime RTX 5070 Ti. That was enough to pass the 7900 XTX and the RTX 4080 but is still a little behind the RTX 4080 SUPER.
I also took a look at DLSS across all of the Nvidia cards using 3dMark’s DLSS benchmark. Everything was run at 4k on the performance setting and tested on each version of DLSS that the card supports. With all of the cards, this gives us a good look at the performance that can be possible with DLSS. With the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC without DLSS, the test averaged 42 FPS, turning on DLSS 1 took that up to 76 FPS and DLSS 2 up to 105. DLSS 3 with the addition of frame generation takes it up to 146 FPS and the latest DLSS 4 with frame generation set to x4 gets a staggering 258 FPS.
In-Game Benchmarks
Now we finally get into the in game performance and that is the main reason people pick up a new video card. To test things out I ran through our new benchmark suite that tests 8 games at three different resolutions (1080p, 1440p, and 4k). Most of the games tested have been run at the highest detail setting and a mid-range detail setting to get a look at how turning things up hurts performance and to give an idea of whether turning detail down from max will be beneficial for frame rates. Cyberpunk 2077 is also tested with Super Sampling (DLSS/FSR/XeSS). In total, each video card is tested 60 times and that makes for a huge mess of results when you put them all together. To help with that I like to start with these overall playability graphs that take all of the results and give an easier-to-read result. I have one for each of the three resolutions and each is broken up into four FPS ranges. Under 30 FPS is considered unplayable, over 30 is playable but not ideal, over 60 is the sweet spot, over 120 FPS is for high refresh rate monitors, and 240 helps show the performance ideal for the latest higher refresh displays.
So how did the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC do? At 1080p every result was over 120 FPS with 10 of the 18 pushing past 240 FPS. The same happened at 1440p, everything was over 120 FPS at that resolution as well. There were 7 up over 240 FPS, this was one result lower than the Prime which is interesting. Then at 4k everything tested was over 60 FPS with 8 results in the 60-119 range and 8 in the 120 to 239 FPS range. There were two up on the high end up over 240 FPS as well. This was a drastic change from the Prime 5070 Ti with its stock clocks which had one result under 60 FPS.
To get a better look at some of the cards that are the closest competition to the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC and averaged out all of our results. Where the graphs above give us a broad look at what kind of performance you might see, this gives us a hard number at each resolution. It’s also perfect at seeing the small difference between two cards with the same GPU which in this case would be the stock-clocked Prime RTX 5070 Ti and the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC. The overclock translated to an average of 3 FPS at 1080p, 2 FPS at 1440p, and a little under 2 FPS at 4k. That did push the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC up over the stock-clocked RX 7900 XTX at 1440p which is interesting. It is still in front at 4k however. Both of the 5070 Ti’s are higher than the two RTX 4080’s with this result but we do have two tests included that are running DLSS and those help push the average up slightly.
Of course, I have all of the actual in game results as well for anyone who wants to sort through the wall of graphs below. The Borderlands Ultra and Ghost Recon at High detail results were the two tests where the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC didn’t outperform the Prime. The Ghost Recon one specifically dropped the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC down below 240 FPS by losing just one FPS.
Another new addition to my testing was a few additional tests using Cyberpunk 2077. This is one of only a few games that support most of the tech from all three of the GPU companies. So I did tests at medium and ultra detail while having Super Sampling on for all of the cards. Using whatever the latest and greatest is supported. In this case, I tested with DLSS both with frame generation set to x2 and x4. Just a note here, the AMD cards only allowed FSR when running windowed mode whereas Nvidia only performed well in fullscreen mode. These give a great look at how Super Sampling performance is different between AMD and Nvidia cards. The two 7900s do well in the base SS results but now that frame generation x4 is available on Cyberpunk 2077 the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC jumps up from 271 at 1440p ultra detail up to 438 FPS which dwarfs the 344 FPS from the RX 7900 XTX.
Compute and AI Benchmarks
Now some people don’t need a video card for gaming, they need the processing power for rendering or 2D/3D production, or in some cases, people who game also do work on the side. AI performance importance has increased quickly recently as well. So it is also important to check out the compute and AI performance on all of the video cards that come in. That includes doing a few different tests. In my first test, I ran Geekbench AI, a cross-platform AI benchmark that uses real-world machine learning tasks giving three results, a full precision score, half-precision score, and quantized score. The TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC improved on what we saw with the Prime by a noticeable margin here. Both cards were already up over the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 SUPER so it didn’t change anything there.
Blender is always my favorite compute benchmark because the open-source 3D rendering software is very popular and it isn’t a synthetic benchmark. With the latest version of Blender, they redid the benchmark so we now have a new test that runs three different renderings and gives each a score. I have all three stacked together so we can see the overall performance. The TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC is slightly ahead of the Prime but even with a little more performance it wasn’t enough to catch up to the RTX 4080 or the RTX 4080 SUPER.
For CUDA-based cards, I also check out V-Ray Benchmark 5 to check out CUDA and RTX performance in the 3D rendering and simulation software. The TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC improved on the Primes CUDA result in v-Ray 5.02 by 24 points but interestingly it came in a hair below it in the RTX test. Both cards are sitting behind the RTX 4080 and out in front of last generation’s xx70 Ti with the RTX 4070 Ti.
Cooling Noise and Power
For my last few tests, rather than focusing on in game performance, I like to check out other aspects of video card performance. These are also the most important ways to differentiate the performance between cards that have the same GPU. To start things off I took a look at power usage.
For this, our test setup utilizes the Nvidia-designed PCat v2 along with cables to handle both traditional 6 or 8-pin connections as well as 12VHPWR. The PCat also utilizes a PCIe adapter to measure any power going to the card through the PCIe slot so we can measure the video card wattage exclusively, not the entire system as we have done in the past. I test with a mix of applications to get both in game, synthetic benchmarks, and other workloads like GeekbenchAI and AIDA64. Then everything is averaged together for our result. I also have the individual results for this specific card and I document the peak wattage result. The TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC averaged 348 watts which was 8 watts more than the 5070 Ti Prime showing that Asus did increase the power for the overclock. Its peak wattage was 362 watts which is 3 watts more than the Prime putting it behind the RX 6750 XT.
With having exact peak wattage numbers when running Time Spy Extreme I was also able to put together a graph showing the total score for each watt that a card draws which gives us an interesting look at overall power efficiency in the popular and demanding benchmark. The TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC came in at 38.19 with its overclock not changing the 3DMark numbers much but the wattage going up putting it a hair below the Prime here.
My next round of tests were looking at noise levels. These are especially important to me because I can’t stand to listen to my PC whirling. Especially when I’m not in game and other applications are using the GPU. For my testing, though I first tested with the fan cranked up to 100% to get an idea of how loud it can get, then again at 50% to get an idea of its range. The TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC came in near the bottom of our chart at 50% fan speed but did move up slightly at 100% fan speed but was still in the bottom half of the chart. The fan speed and 100% charts match up perfectly which just tells us its noise performance is in line with where it should be.
I also take a look at noise performance while under load. For that when running AIDA64’s stress test I wait until the temperature of the card has leveled off and then measure how loud things are when the card is at its worst-case scenario with the stock fan profile. Here the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC landed down in the bottom 1/3 of the chart .7dB below the Prime. This is surprising when you see the fan speed percentage when under load which has the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC up in the top half of the chart at 52% fan speed.
To finish up my testing I of course had to check out the cooling performance. To do this I ran two different tests. I used AIDA64’s Stress Test run for a half-hour each to warm things up (on everything except the 5090 which was tested on a similarly matched OCCT workload). Then I documented what temperature the GPU leveled out at with the stock fan profile and then again with the fans cranked up to 100%. With the stock profile, the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC was running cool at 60c, 4c lower than the Prime. The memory temps were also solid at 48c with the stock fan profile 2c lower than the Prime. Cranking the fan speed up to 100% the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC runs at 53c making the delta between the stock profile and 100% being 7c which is a little low. Given that we saw the stock fan profile has the cards at 52% when under load this just tells us that Asus has the fan profile set aggressively on this profile. Given how the noise results came out, I would say that it didn’t turn out bad. A lot of times a fan profile like that will give good cooling performance but make the card noisy.
While running the stock fan profile testing I also took the time to get a few thermal images so we could see what is going on. The fan side of the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC shows that the left side of the card does run a little warmer but not nearly as much as most cards. The hot spot here is 31c and the blow-through area is in line with the center of the card, Asus did a great job of balancing the cooling out across the card. Up on the top edge where we can see the PCB we do see that the PCB is 5c warmer from one end to the other and we can see it pushing air up through the top and the blow-through section is much cooler. On the back, the metal backplate has thermal pads pulling heat from the back of the PCB so it is acting as a heatsink as well and you can see that with it running 42-45c. The exposed PCB behind the GPU is the hotspot of course but at 54c is cooler than you would normally see.
Overall and Final Verdict
With all of the testing out of the way, we can finally step back and get an overall look at the Asus TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC. Getting to check out the Prime RTX 5070 Ti before this gives us a great comparison of how two out of the three Asus 5070 Ti designs. They have the Strix model as well and all three designs have stock-clocked and overclocked versions. The TUF Gaming design loses the blacked-out design that I liked with the Prime model but the styling does fit the TUF brand well and seems to be a great middle ground between the thinner SFF-ready Prime design and the full on “gamer” styling of the ROG Strix RTX 5070 Ti. You get a partial metal fan shroud and while it has neutral colors it is a departure from the other two designs. That said, this is a huge card and you will need to plan around that. It is longer and taller than the Prime but it’s the 3 and a half slot thickness that makes the card so big. The power connection is up on top and faces directly up, so keep that in mind as well. Beyond that the only other styling change that I would like to see would be a blacked-out PCI bracket, not only do they look better but they also better match most cases.
The large card size helped when it came to cooling performance, the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC outperformed the Prime 5070 Ti in all of our tests (which itself did well adding to the impressiveness). It also did very well in our noise tests and that was with Asus running an aggressive fan profile. For overall performance it had great 1440k performance, running right with the RTX 4080 SUPER in a lot of tests. The overclock did help in game but didn’t show up as much in some of our synthetic benchmarks. Overall that averaged 2-3 FPS across all three resolutions. Like with the other 50 Series cards, the biggest improvements can be found revolving around ray tracing and DLSS. The new DLSS 4 offers huge improvements both in frame rate and visually and that is where the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC shows itself the most. Of course that only helps if the games you want to play support it but they do have around 75 games.
At the end of the day, price is what makes a card good or not. To help with that I put together a graph comparing all of the cards tested with their MSRP and current pricing and figuring in 3Dmark Time Spy Extreme performance to give each a score. The TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC’s higher MSRP compared to the Prime pushes it down the chart but is more realistic to what we might see when cards come back in stock. Those MSRP-focused stock-clocked cards are always hard to come by. Sadly though because of the demand the pricing of the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC right now is even higher than that. Frankly, ALL cards are crazy right now but with the only TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC for sale in the $1335 range, it is way down in our chart here. I hope we start to see cards come back in stock and demand be reached so things will settle down, but there aren’t any indications right now that will happen. Overall, the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC is a good card, Asus’s design, while big, performed well compared to even their own Prime 5070 Ti. So if you end up in the market for an RTX 5070 Ti in the future it would be a good option.
Live Pricing: HERE
