 After all the controversy surrounding the lack of RTX on and the inflated pricing of the RTX 2080, today is the day that many of you have been waiting for, the launch of the less expensive and more obtainable, RTX 2070. But just because something is affordable doesn't mean you should buy it. Intrigued? Good, that's the point of this entire paragraph. It's called a hook. And this part is called a sponsor. GlassWire allows you to instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Use offer code Linus and get 25% off at the link below. The biggest headline feature of the 2070, somewhat ironically, is the one that it doesn't have. So for the first time since Nvidia changed to their current naming scheme back in 2008, the 70 value enthusiast card doesn't do SLI. All that remains of the 1070's SLI functionality is this sad little cutout in the shroud that no longer serves any purpose whatsoever. Not that we've really pushed SLI as a sensible solution for years. So I guess Nvidia's slow march towards killing what used to be one of their highlight enthusiast features only really bothers me on a nostalgic level. Let's change gears now then to something that bothers me a little bit more objectively, pricing. With the enthusiast RTX cards, this honestly didn't bother me as much because the 80 series has traditionally targeted the affluent gamer who cares less about price to performance and more about raw power. But the reference RTX 2070 is priced at 500 US dollars with the overclocked founder's edition priced at 600 US dollars. That puts these new 2070 cards not directly up against the previous 1070, but rather the GTX 1080 from Nvidia's last generation lineup and AMD's Vega 56. So we'll be comparing all of these cards today. Although sadly we'll only be using our Intel bench since time was not on our side. Like no joke, we actually got our card 18 hours before this video was supposed to go live. It's a good thing Anthony's a good sport about this kind of thing. So with Deus Ex mankind divided, we get a pretty big jump in performance over the GTX 1080. And that's pretty much the end of that chapter. With the rest of our test suite getting just a few frames per second more regardless of whether we're looking at DirectX 11 or DirectX 12. 3D Mark and Unigine superposition do let the 2070 stretch its legs a little bit more, but overall we are in the same ballpark as our reference GTX 1080 and a factory overclocked 1080 would probably be on par. When we hit it with our productivity workloads though, like its bigger cousins, the RTX 2070 delivers consistently good performance compared to the GTX 1080 of yesteryear, making it quite comparable in most cases to even the RX Vega 64, even in open CL tasks like Luxmark that typically favor Vega. And in heavy lifting tasks like most, but not all of Specview Perf's professional rendering workloads. It should of course be noted that most enthusiasts and professionals won't want to go for a reference card like this one, preferring instead to opt for something like this Strix. But the thing is, while normally these beefier custom cards quickly fall close to reference pricing, this time it might take a while. The 499 MSRP that Nvidia has slapped onto reference cards allegedly has their partner selling these boards for basically no margin. And why should you the consumer care about that? Well, because as a result, you can expect to pay closer to the founders edition 599 price point for custom board cards for the foreseeable future. And with this being the lowest tier of GPU with tensor cores and RTX support, that means that 500 to $600 will be the lowest point of entry for these technologies until Nvidia delivers a 3000 series refresh sometime in, oh, I don't know, let's say 2022 at the rate that they're going. So then RTX 2070, to buy or not to buy? It's a really complicated question. So let's start with the price. On the surface, it's not that much higher than the 1080 that it traded blows with in our benchmarks. But MSRP aside, aggressive sale prices have 1080s as low as $65 cheaper already. And that's right now while we're working on this video, before the 2070 has even launched. So I would expect them to go lower still. Which means that what we need to determine then is if the features of the new gen justify the added expense. Some of them are pretty easy to evaluate like the improved NVENC encoder that outputs similar quality real-time capture to X264 fast with a negligible performance hit. That's gonna be a huge hit for anyone who game streams. Go for it. Other features, well, it gets more complicated because, surprise, there is still no real RTX games. There's no real content to set this thing apart from the last gen or even to measure how much of a performance impact that we might expect from the real-time ray tracing feature that Nvidia is banking on so hard to sell these things that they put it right in the name. Further complicating the matter is the used market right now. So with the recent cryptocurrency mining crash, sites like eBay have been absolutely flooded with last generation high-performance GPUs. And right now, 1080 TIs, which perform more like an RTX 2080 in conventional games, can be had for the same price as an RTX 2070. And as we demonstrated in this video, a used video card might not carry any warranty, but it'll perform exactly the same after its heavy use as it did when it was new. We can't tell you not to buy an RTX 2070 because it's fine, I guess, but we can't tell you to buy it because its main selling points are still completely missing in action. The only thing that we really can say conclusively today is that this launch from Nvidia is all the evidence that we need to say that they absolutely require a competitor to keep their pricing in line. Rather than follow the IT industry standard of mostly inflationary pricing increases that even Intel, Intel maintained through the second to sixth generation core series processor launches, remember, this is when they had no competition from AMD to speak of, Nvidia has just kicked the convention to the curb. Instead of using the architectural improvements to deliver more bang for the buck to consumers, Nvidia has instead taken their new products and basically plonked them right down on top of the old ones. So instead of taking the money that you had last year and getting more for it today, you can get more, but you will just need to shell out extra cash. I mean, the argument from Nvidia might be that RTX is what adds more bang for those bucks, but at this point, I'm just being asked to take their word for it and I can't do that. You know what I can do is tell you guys about Ting. Ting is the mobile carrier that's focused on customer service and satisfaction. With Ting, when you call them, this is crazy, you don't speak to a robot, you get put through directly to a person who can help you and you don't pay extra for the privilege. With Ting, you pay only for what you use with the average bill coming in at just 23 bucks a month per device. If you're stuck in a contract and switch to Ting, they'll even cover 25% of your cancellation fee and they have lower mobile data rates than ever before. It's just $10 per gig beyond the second gig. So go check out their savings calculator at linus2018.ting.com and find out how much you'd be able to save on Ting. We're gonna have that link down below. And if you use our link, you're gonna get 25 bucks off your bill or towards a new phone. So thanks for watching guys. If you disliked this video, then I'm sorry. I'm sorry Nvidia staff out there. I mean, we tried to be nice to it, but like, what are we supposed to say? It's like faster video cards for more expensive. It's not like a huge win for the average gamer. Maybe, maybe non-RTX. What is it gonna be a GTX 2060? This is gonna get really confusing. So if you guys disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link below. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one. Whoops, no, not like this one. We have cool shirts there though. And our community forum, which you should totally join.