 What in heaven's name are you doing watching YouTube videos right now? Get out there and buy an RTX 3070, now! It's okay, I'll wait. All right, now that you've secured your place in the queue in hopes of receiving a card before the end of this ridiculous year, let's find out if you're gonna be keeping it or if you're gonna be scalping it on eBay for twice what you paid. I never scalped my Segways though. Ridge Wallet wants to redefine the wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates. Keep your wallet bulged down by using offer code Linus to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping at the link below. ["Dreams of a New World"] Clearly, Nvidia has had issues keeping up with demand for their 3000 series graphics cards. And while they claim that they pushed back the launch of today's RTX 3070 to shore up supply, given that this is positioned as an RTX 2080 Ti killer for 500 bucks US, I doubt anything they've done in the last couple of weeks is gonna help. Unless of course we fire it up on our trusty test bench and it falls way short of expectations. Although, spoiler alert, we did already tell you to buy one. It looks like as far as Nvidia's big gaming performance claims go, the RTX 3070 does just fine, matching or beating our 2080 Ti Founders Edition more often than not. At least in games that take advantage of its beefier RT cores and tensor cores, which are focused on real-time ray tracing and deep learning workloads respectively. Now there was a time in the past when we might've called Nvidia's DLSS deep learning upscaling a performance hack and forced their cards to compete with it disabled. But there's just no other way to put this. It's gotten really good. When we turned all that stuff off in Wolfenstein Youngblood though, and forced a more traditional rendering approach, we did observe a small but measurable four to 5% dip in performance. So it isn't quite a 2080 Ti, but at less than half the price, I don't think anyone's complaining. Microsoft Flight Simulator, while CPU bound at virtually any resolution, revealed a curious twist in our story though. The minimum frame rate is lower than the 2080 Ti, but the average is higher, suggesting that while the GPU is fast enough to keep up, there's a memory bandwidth bottleneck in the mix thanks to the 3070's narrower 256-bit bus. It still excels in our parallel Nintendo 64 test, but Counter-Strike Global Offensive sees it fall below the RTX 2080 Ti again. Although we're still talking 450 versus 470 frames per second. So it's pretty easy to forgive when you look at the bigger picture. Productivity is another area where Nvidia's new Ampere architecture GPUs really shine. Our blender renders on the 3070 went roughly 20 to 30% faster than the 2080 Ti. That is a significant improvement, likely down to the sheer number of CUDA cores that Nvidia has packed into this thing with Samsung's eight nanometer process. V-Ray and Redshift show us similar results, while OctaneBench shows us once again, the difference between having RTX on versus off. Those RT cores are where this GPU's main advantage comes into play whenever memory bandwidth is an issue. Speaking of which, the new SPECviewperf 2020 shows us that while it's great for rendering and nearly as good for some other tasks that just need to crunch numbers, a lot of high-end workstation users suffer from the constrained memory bandwidth of consumer cards like this one, and performance of our RTX 3070 fell to as low as 80% of what the last gen RTX 2080 could provide. To be fair to Nvidia though, that's not what this card is designed to do. It just happens to be a consideration if you're self-employed or working from home, and you do need to run these applications during work hours. If we average all of our results though, we can see that we're hovering right around that magic 100% mark compared to the 2080 Ti, which is extremely impressive, unless the 3070 has an Achilles heel that we haven't found yet. Let's take a closer look then at our Founders Edition card. It's kind of adorable, isn't it? It's got the same flow through cooler design as the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, but it's super tiny and has the same fan layout as the RTX 20 series, which isn't to say it's light. I was surprised at how heavy it is for its size, and I was surprised to see Nvidia's new radical 12-pin power connector in the same visually jarring position. I mean, at least the adapter only requires a single eight pin instead of two, which, wait, why the heck wouldn't they just use a single eight pin then? It's the same physical size. Like they could just, ah! Interestingly, the grill on the IO plate is indented a little, so it bolts directly onto the cooler rather than tabs on the display outputs, making the design feel much sturdier and therefore more likely to survive a drop. Cool joke, Anthony. Just like the water in this bottle is cool. Almost hit the mic. LTTstore.com. But is the 3070 Founders Edition cool? Yeah, it's all right. Our card was able to ramp to 1.9 to two gigahertz all day long with its core sitting at RTX 2080 Ti temperatures, which is toastier than our RTX 2070 Super, but in fairness, the cooler here is significantly smaller, which shows just how efficient Nvidia's pass-through approach is. When we look at power consumption, it was a touch higher over the course of our spec view perf run compared with the RTX 2070 Super with our peak recorded wattage no higher than 253 watts compared to that card's 224. This is excellent news because the RTX 3080 guzzled far more power than even the 2080 Ti, and the RTX 3090 sees massive power spikes that can cause mere mortal power supplies to just blink off thanks to their overcurrent protection. On that subject, you'll have to forgive me for going back to the previous 3000 series launches again here, but there was yet another power debacle where some partner boards would crash due to a flawed power delivery design. Some brands ended up shipping bad boards all the way to customers, but even ones who didn't, like EVGA, suffered product delays from not having all the testing and info that they needed in time for launch. Now, nobody would go on the record for us blaming Nvidia for this outright, but as far as we can put together, Team Green just didn't give their partners enough lead time to flesh out their designs, while they themselves enjoyed a massive head start putting together revolutionary new coolers for their Ampere cards. Now, I've given Nvidia the benefit of the doubt on this so far, but with today's move, it's clear that they are openly and unashamedly competing on an uneven playing field against their own partners. What have they done today, you might ask? Well, look around. Where are all the reviews of non-founders RTX 3070s that have normal power connectors on them? Not in any Nvidia sanctioned reviews at the embargo lift. Why? Well, because their embargo hasn't lifted yet. It's kind of genius, really. Nvidia goes and creates a big splash and sells out of their Founders Edition cards first, which they've had longer to perfect. Then their partners rush to launch their competing products with less time to prepare, giving Nvidia a second wave of review coverage comparing their product, the GPU itself, with their product, the Founders Edition card, often quite favorably. Now, I doubt that anything that I say is gonna change Nvidia's behavior because this guy clearly gives zero f**ks at this point, but it's a crappy way to treat a partner. And I wanted to make sure that at least they feel bad about it. On the subject of competition though, AMD's Radeon announcement is tomorrow, which again, knowing Nvidia is probably why they carpet bombed the review cycle. So cut through all of that noise by getting subscribed so you don't miss our coverage. But that's not today, that's tomorrow. So today, from numbers alone, it was always gonna be easy to recommend the RTX 3070 to anyone in this price range. That is assuming that you got one before you finished watching the intro, because chances are they're all gone by now unless you wanna pay scalper prices on eBay. The good news for the entire industry though, is that Nvidia's supply woes could be AMD's big chance to make a splash with the unveiling of their new Radeon 6000 series. We still don't know for sure what that's gonna look like, but what we do know is that between it, 3070's compelling value and the potential for deals on last gen cards come Black Friday, it is gonna be a good season to buy a gaming rig. Oh yeah, and the consoles too. They're good value too, like dang! It's pretty sick to be a gamer these days. Just like it's pretty sick to segue to our sponsors, like the MSI Mag B550 Tomahawk motherboard. It's got an AM4 socket with support for third gen Ryzen processors and future AMD Ryzen processors with a BIOS update. It supports DDR4 memory up to 5,100 megahertz. It's got PCI express Gen 4, so it is ready for your PCI express Gen 4 graphics cards and SSDs and features a premium thermal solution, two and a half gig on board LAN and great looks. Check it out today at the link in the video description. Thanks for watching guys. If you enjoyed this video, why not check out our previous review of the RTX 3080 to see why we really, really like these cards. If only they were available to buy.