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.
