Overall and Final Verdict
With all of our testing out of the way, we can finally step back and get a look at everything together. Like with the other Founders Edition cards, the card construction is next level on the RTX 5070 Founders Edition. Nvidia uses an all-metal shroud design using a thick cast metal which gives it a premium feel and gives no worries about any sagging issues going into the future. Where aftermarket cards excel at cooling and noise, the Founders Edition trades some of that off for a compact design. Not only is it a proper 2 slot card, but it also doesn’t stick up past the PCI bracket. You won’t have to worry about it fitting in nearly anything. For styling, they continued the styling that all Founders Edition cards have had, and while it doesn’t have the dual blow-through design we saw on the larger RTX 5080 and RTX 5090, the RTX 5070 Founders Edition does still have the same look.
For performance, you can expect to be able to throw anything at it at 1080p or 1440p. Even at 4k, everything in our test suite was still playable, but with just 12GB of VRAM, it did drop in performance. In some of my DLSS testing where I cranked ray tracing completely up on the latest games, it couldn’t handle 4k at all. Beyond that situation though, DLSS 4 was especially impressive giving at times up to a 550% increase in performance to turn good performance into a frame rate you would want to use a high refresh rate display on. I spoke about it in the other 50 Series reviews, but DLSS 4 hasn’t just increased frame rates, it is smoother and looks a lot better. It’s not perfect, but it has reached the point where all but the pickiest person isn’t going to have an issue with it. When it comes to in-game performance the RTX 5070 Founders Edition traded blows with the overclocked RTX 4070 Ti and 4070 Ti SUPER but when it came to our averaged numbers it was out in front of the RTX 4070 Ti by a small margin when not figuring in our tests with multi frame generation. It outperformed the Radeon RX 7800 XT by a large margin and offered an improvement of 75% when compared to the RTX 3070 which is the most likely upgrade path to the 5070. The Founders Edition cooler did end up running warmer than the other cards tested, the more compact design didn’t overheat at all but isn’t leaving a lot of headroom either. That said it was quieter at 100% than I would have expected considering it had its fans running faster than any of the other cards tested.
As always, it will all come down to pricing. There aren’t bad cards, only bad pricing. The RTX 5070 Founders Edition has an MSRP of $549 which is the base MSRP of the RTX 5070 in general. But keep in mind, as we have seen with just about every launch for the last 4+ generations demand is always higher than supply, and with that pricing starts to go out of the window. Not only that but when cards come back in stock, it's normally the more expensive overclocked models. With that in mind, I did put together a chart that breaks down performance with MSRP and current pricing. With demand going crazy and tariff-fueled pricing you can see most of the cards have a big difference between their MSRP and actual pricing. All prices were pulled from the lowest price on PCPartPicker. Overall AMD is dominating the top of the chart but if you can get the RTX 5070 at or near the MSRP it will be a good pickup. The best comparison is with the RX 7800 XT which is selling for as low as $529 and as we saw the RTX 5070 outperformed it handedly. The RTX 5070 would be a better buy as long as you can get it for less than $610.
Live Pricing: HERE
