The RTX 3070 Ti is a great mid-range to high-end GPU, with excellent performance in rasterised games plus DLSS and RT support, but it’s been hard to find at a good price if you haven’t lucked out with a Founders Edition restock. Prices for third-party cards are slowly falling, and now have reached within £100 of the £549 UK RRP – an important milestone for GPUs that cost £1000 or more at the beginning of the year.
The cheapest RTX 3070 Ti model we’ve found is a Zotac RTX 3070 Ti Trinity at Ebuyer, who are asking £649 with a despatch date of April 26th(tomorrow!). If you want the cheapest model that’s in stock right now, then that’ll be the Inno3D RTX 3070 Ti X3 at Overclockers for £10 more. Either way, you’ll be left with a performant graphics card that requires only a modest 750W PSU, less than Nvidia’s higher-end GPUs and much less than the company’s next-gen products rumoured to arrive towards the end of this year.
There are other, fancier RTX 3070 Ti versions available but I personally wouldn’t spend much more to get them – ultimately, in-game performance is going to be determined by the GPU inside rather than whatever manufacturers bolt on outside. Better designs with thicker coolers, more effective fans and so on will let the card operate at a lower noise level, but unless you’re into extreme overclocking the difference in actual in-game frame-rate will be neglible. Both Zotac and Inno3D are good budget brands that deliver sanely designed graphics cards at a reasonable price, so that’s enough for me.
Beyond ‘is this particular model of GPU any good?’, the next pertinent question is ‘is this GPU any good?’ The answer is a little complicated. After all, the RTX 3070 Ti wasn’t the best value graphics card when it was released, with the original RTX 3070 beating it out in terms of performance per pound spent, at UK RRP. However, that only applies when the graphics cards are actually available to order at their UK RRP. As it stands, the cheapest RTX 3070 cards in stock are more expensive than their RTX 3070 Ti counterparts – so you may as well have the extra performance from the Ti model!
To quickly sum up the differences between the two cards, the 3070 Ti is built around a fully-enabled GA104 die, while the 3070 uses a cut-back model with fewer CUDA cores and a lower clock speed. The 3070 Ti also comes with faster GDDR6X memory, rated at 608GB/s versus 448GB/s on the vanilla 3070. Finally, the 3070 Ti is given a power budget of 290W (on the reference design), compared to 220W on the standard 3070. That allows for better performance, but also a bit more heat production. The Ti is definitely the better choice if both cards are at the same price, but its frame-rate advantage is usually between five and 10 percent in the games I’ve tested.
Of course, it’s still way faster than a 10-series or 20-series Nvidia card (or AMD’s RX 500-series and Vega GPUs), so you’ll likely still be very happy with its performance overall – especially at 1080p and 1440p where the 3070 Ti should be capable of playing AAA titles at high settings for years to come.
Anyway, this post is getting long, so I’ll wrap up for now! Let me know if you have any questions, and stay tuned for more deals in the near future. Until then, farewell!