AORUS RTX 2070 XTREME Review

Overclocking and Verdict

Since I’ve been talking overclocked performance, it seems appropriate to mention that this performance is possible largely due to the cooler. , where GPU boost clocks would settle at 1890MHz at the lowest. During heavy gaming sessions however, the boost clock remains at a healthy 1920MHz at default and 1980MHz when overclocked w (+100MHz and + 725MHz on the memory). High clocks all around and the core clock is better than GIGABYTE’s claim of a 1,815MHz Core frequency. During testing, the GPU core remained far above 1815MHz and speaks well of the TU106 GPU and what GIGABYTE has put together.

Outside this level of overclocking there’s not much you can do here. A water block would naturally help keep the boost clocks even higher, and of course with more exotic cooling methods and the relevant mods, even more could be extracted from the graphics card. Given the small performance boost that comes via overclocking the GPU core clock only, I would stick to memory overclocking mainly. The Micron GDDR6 memory may not be as capable as the SAMSUNG GDDR6, but it is as equally responsible if not more so for the performance boost in the benchmarks.

Verdict

As a package, the AORUs RTX 2070 Xtreme is a fair offering, ticking all the right boxes (It’s a graphics card so there are few) and delivers fairly high-end performance for the most part. The card runs cool enough without sounding like a jet engine and of course has a 0dB or Fan-stop mode as well. If you care for packaged goodies, GIGABYTE has included a VGA holder, which is basically an easy to assemble standoff. This small but valuable addition prevents torsion on the graphics card. Again, this is a small addition, but one well worth it I believe. For all the above, the AORUS RTX 2070 deserves a perfect score, but what prevents that is the lacklustre software and the seemingly budget plastics used on the heat sink shroud. It isn’t obvious in pictures and materially it doesn’t matter, but graphics cards these days have few things to distinguish themselves with, so every advantage counts. Outside of the all the above, the AORUS RTX 2070 is well worth your time. Suitable for gaming at up to 3440×1440 in many titles. This is obviously not going to be the case with the games that use RT. In such instances, 1920×1080 with a reasonable amount of ray tracing seems to do the trick. Ultimately, finding fault with the AORUS RTX 2070 Xtreme barring the software will prove difficult. At this price and with the recent NVIDIA bundle offer (Choice between Metro Exodus, Anthem and Battlefield V), the $599 asking price is more than reasonable.