Power and Temperature
To test the power and temperature we perform a manual run-through in Cyberpunk 2077 at “Ultra” settings for real-world in-game data. We use GPU-Z sensor data to record the results. We report on the GPU-Z sensor data for “Board Power” and “GPU Chip Power” when available for our Wattage data. For temperature data, we report the GPU (Edge Temp of the GPU or Package Temp) as well as Hot Spot (Junction Temperature) when available for our temperature data.
The NVIDIA reference TGP for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER Founders Edition is 220W. In our power graph, we are hitting a board power of 222.6W, which is right on target for total board power. As we know, this power would be higher than the GeForce RTX 4070, and we can see that it is 17% higher than the GeForce RTX 4070 FE, or 32W more power.
Considering we saw performance improvements that were around this percentage, and sometimes even higher above 20%, it indicates how power-efficient the AD104 GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER really is. We are getting a linear performance-to-power improvement, even better performance-to-power, at times, which is extremely positive. The GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER is power efficient, and you are getting an equal or more performance upgrade for the power.
The same cannot be said for the Radeon RX 7800 XT, it is very power inefficient. At 253W it pulls 14% more power than the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER or 30W more, yet it is slower in every game. The GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER is beating the Radeon RX 7800 XT in performance, and doing it while pulling less power. That’s impressive, and it will matter for a lot of people.
Though the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER pulls 17% more power, the GPU temperatures do not increase that much. The Founders Edition has the same design on both video cards, and we see the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER only has about a 6% warmer GPU or a 3.6-degree difference. The hot spot temperature only increases by 1 degree. These are very good temperatures and show how good of a cooler the Founders Edition cooler is. By comparison, the Radeon RX 7800 XT runs very hot, with 75c GPU and 94c Hot Spot, these temperatures are in vast contrast to the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 SUPER Founders Edition cards.
Default GPU Clock Frequency
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER Founders Edition has its Boost Clock set at 2475MHz by default. NVIDIA GPU Boost can dynamically run the clock speed faster than this if the thermal headroom and power headroom is there, and that is what we see happening on the RTX 4070 SUPER FE video card. In this graph, we can see the frequency starts off around 2760MHz, then drops down to around 2730MHz on average, back-and-forth between 2700-2730MHz while gaming. This is about a 10% boost to the clock speed out-of-the-box with the default GPU Boost behavior on the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER Founders Edition.
Below is a screenshot of GPU-Z with the video card at full load. We can see that the fans spin up to around 39% at these temperatures, so they remain quite quiet. We can also see the GPU Voltage is at 1.1000V.
