The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition Review: Mid-Range Turing, High-End Price
by Nate Oh on October 16, 2018 9:00 AM ESTPower, Temperature, and Noise
As always, we'll take a look at power, temperature, and noise of the RTX 2070 Founders Edition, especially considering its atypically large GPU, new cooler design, new fixed-function hardware, and higher TDPs. For the most part, the dual axial fan open air design provide straightforward benefits in lower noise and cooling, though with drawbacks as mentioned earlier.
As this is a new GPU, we will quickly review the GeForce RTX 2070's stock voltages and clockspeeds as well.
GeForce Video Card Voltages | |||||
RTX 2070 Boost | GTX 1070 Boost | RTX 2070 Idle | GTX 1070 Idle | ||
1.050v | 1.062v | 0.718v | 0.625v |
The voltages are broadly comparable to the preceding 16nm GTX 1070. In comparison to pre-FinFET generations, these voltages are exceptionally lower because of the FinFET process used, something we went over in detail in our GTX 1080 and 1070 Founders Edition review. As we said then, the 16nm FinFET process requires said low voltages as opposed to previous planar nodes, so this can be limiting in scenarios where a lot of power and voltage are needed, i.e. high clockspeeds and overclocking. Of course, Turing (along with Volta, Xavier, and NVSwitch) are built on 12nm "FFN" rather than 16nm, but there is little detail on the exact process tweaks.
GeForce Video Card Average Clockspeeds | ||||
Game | RTX 2070 | RTX 2070 FE | GTX 1070 | |
Max Boost Clock |
2160MHz
|
2160MHz |
1898MHz
|
|
Boost Clock | 1620MHz | 1710MHz | 1683MHz | |
Battlefield 1 | 1723MHz | 1825MHz | 1787MHz | |
Far Cry 5 | 1734MHz | 1824MHz | 1784MHz | |
Ashes: Escalation | 1775MHz | 1853MHz | 1774MHz | |
Wolfenstein II | 1644MHz | 1719MHz | 1728MHz | |
Final Fantasy XV | 1690MHz | 1786MHz | 1749MHz | |
Grand Theft Auto V | 1802MHz | 1881MHz | 1832MHz | |
Shadow of War | 1669MHz | 1775MHz | 1768MHz | |
F1 2018 | 1780MHz | 1826MHz | 1787MHz | |
Total War: Warhammer II | 1743MHz | 1833MHz | 1786MHz |
In terms of clockspeeds, the RTX 2070 isn't bringing any surprises. Like Pascal and the GTX 1070, the boost clock reading is used liberally, usually boosting beyond, and varies per game/workload. With the +90MHz Founders Edition OC, the RTX 2070 dutifully ramps up. What remains to be seen is how these clockspeeds hold when RT cores or tensor cores are actively and steadily utilized. In any case, at its Founders Edition specs, the RTX 2070 has perhaps another 100MHz or so to push, but otherwise is out of headroom (or power).
The steady TDP creep has taken its toll, and the 2070 is no longer a power-sipper of the likes of the 1070 or 970. At the very least, it is far from the excesses of its older 2080 Ti and 2080 siblings. Of note is its additional power draw over the GTX 1080, which in certain games trades blows with the 2070.
Temperature
The adoption of an open air cooler with dual axial fans has immediate benefits, especially with a lower temperature target.
Noise
In turn, the open air cooler allows for quieter, slower spinning axial fans.
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ThanosPAS - Saturday, November 10, 2018 - link
Does 2070 worth it vs 1070 for its Tensor cores? I would utilize the card on machine learning. In Final Words, this wasn't covered. It seems to me that 2070 is the cheapest solution in rder to get dedicated Tensor cores, which if I am not mistaken make a great portion of difference in the computational performance between these two cards. Opinions?