Time to start SUPER Overclocking
Introduction
On July 2nd, 2019 NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER and GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER video cards. The GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER would debut at a retail price of $499. The GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER would debut at a retail price of $399. It wasn’t until July 9th that they were available, but we were able to test performance on both video cards in the format of NVIDIA’s Founders Edition video cards. In our review, both video cards performed exceptionally well in games. However, there was one aspect of performance we did not have time to dive into yet, overclocking.
It has now been nearly two months, and retail custom video cards based on these new GPUs are rolling in. We have retail custom SUPER video cards lined up ready to review for you. Before we dive into them, we wanted to do something similar to what we did with our recent AMD Radeon RX 5700 Series Overclocking review. In that review, we overclocked the reference AMD video cards to use as a baseline and comparison when we get to retail video cards based on those GPUs. We can compare the overclocks and thermals achieved on the retail cards with the reference cards to see the benefits of the custom video cards.
We are going to do the same thing with the GeForce RTX SUPER video cards. First, we are going to overclock the Founders Edition versions so that we have a baseline of comparisons to make with retail custom video cards. Then when we review all upcoming retail custom video cards, we can compare the maximum overclock with the Founders Edition plus the temperatures, and noise levels and power while overclocking.
This gives us data we can build on to compare retail custom video cards with the Founders Edition as our baseline. In this way, you can see the benefits that paying the premium for custom retail video cards bring and we can see if they are worth the extra money. Today we are going to start with the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER because that will be the first retail custom video card review we have coming up.
GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER
Let’s just quickly re-brief on what the GeForce RTX 2070 FE is all about. Firstly, this video card has an MSRP of $499 and replaces the need for the GeForce RTX 2070. At this price, the RTX 2070 SUPER is $100 less than the Founders Edition of the RTX 2070 but performs closer to RTX 2080 performance. The GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER is based on TU104 and has 40 SMs with 2560 CUDA Cores and 64 ROPs and 140 Texture Units. It also has 320 Tensor Cores and 40 RT Cores.
The clock speed has a base clock of 1605MHz and a boost clock of 1770MHz. There is 8GB of GDDR6 at 14GHz on a 256-bit bus giving us 448GB/s of memory bandwidth. The TGP is 215W.
Our goals in this review are to simply overclock the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER Founders Edition video card. We will see what the clock speeds look like before overclocking, and when overclocked. The clock speed will be tested to its highest goal. We will attempt overvolting to achieve the best clock speed as well. Then we will test some games and see what the general consensus is in regards to performance advantages with overclocking. This will allow us to have a baseline for all future retail custom video cards moving forward that we can compare with.