Conclusion
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition launched at $599, and while we found it capable at 1440p in our full review, we knew it could go further. It turns out, this little video card has some overclocking potential. In today’s NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition Overclocked Review, we took the new video card and pushed it as hard as we could. We tested with Ray Tracing, and DLSS and compared it with the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, GeForce RTX 3070, and AMD Radeon RX 6800. The GeForce RTX 4070 is a cut-down AD104 die RTX 4070 Ti with 12GB of GDDR6X and a boost clock of 2475MHz.
Overclocking
Using MSI Afterburner we managed to increase the Power Target up by 10% on this video card. We were also able to manually set the fan speeds but found out it wasn’t really needed as this video card really keeps its cool well. This is due to the fact that it has a good cooler, but more to the point it just runs really efficiently on power, and does well as the TDP decreases in SKU. It scales down really well, and also scales up, in terms of GPU clock frequency.
The boost clock on the GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition is set at 2475MHz, but in reality due to GPU Boost it will clock up to 2775MHz, with 2745MHz at the lowest. That’s already a 300MHz boost. On top of that, we were able to add a +10% power target, and up the GPU Clock to +240. This resulted in a consistent 3030MHz while gaming, adding another 255MHz on top of that, for a 9% overclock. In addition, the memory easily overclocked from 21GHz up to 23GHz, giving us more bandwidth.
We were actually able to top the video card out at 3.1GHz, but only for a few minutes of gaming before it crashed. We did manage 3090MHz in a few games, while others crashed, especially with Ray Tracing enabled. Our stable overclock was at 3030MHz, still cresting that 3GHz mark. We think it is possible some well-binned GPUs, or video cards that are engineered really well might hit that 3.1GHz mark on the GeForce RTX 4070, so look out for cards that are capable of that.
Final Points
When we overclocked the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition, performance increased to different results depending on the game. We got between 5-9% performance uplift, depending on the game. This is enough to make a difference in some really tough games or to smooth out performance with Ray Tracing. It wasn’t game-changing though, it just added to create a smoother experience in the really demanding areas of games. The option that provided the best boost to performance was DLSS, which made unplayable scenarios, playable.
The efficiency of the GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition cannot be understated, however. This video card is so efficient, that even overclocked it still sips less power than the GeForce RTX 3070. We also found the Founders Edition cooling to be more than adequate for overclocking, even though it is a small and slim video card. This video card really is a perfect fit for a small form factor, or anyone looking for power efficiency and keeping things cool. The great thing is, you can overclock, and still obtain this goal.