Buy THIS Instead - RTX 2070 Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,578 words · ~7 min read
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after all the controversy surrounding the lack of rtx on and the inflated
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pricing of the rtx 2080 today is the day
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that many of you have been waiting for the launch of the less expensive and
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more obtainable rtx 2070
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but just because something is affordable doesn't mean you should buy it
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intrigued good that's the point of this entire
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paragraph it's called a hook and this part is called a sponsor glass
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the biggest headline feature of the 2070
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somewhat ironically is the one that it doesn't have so for the first time since
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NVIDIA changed to their current naming scheme back in 2008 the
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70 value enthusiast card doesn't do
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sli all that remains of the 1070s sli
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functionality is this sad little cutout
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in the shroud that no longer serves any purpose whatsoever
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not that we've really pushed sli as a sensible solution for years so
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i guess NVIDIA's slow march towards killing what used to be one of their
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highlight enthusiast features only really bothers me on a nostalgic level
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let's change gears now then to something that bothers me a little bit more
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objectively pricing with the enthusiast rtx cards
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this honestly didn't bother me as much
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because the 80 series has traditionally targeted the affluent gamer who cares
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less about price to performance and more about raw power
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but the reference rtx 2070 is priced at
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500 us dollars with the overclocked founders edition priced at 600 us
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dollars that puts these new
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2070 cards not directly up against the
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previous 1070 but rather the gtx 1080 from NVIDIA's
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last generation lineup and AMD's vega 56
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so we'll be comparing all of these cards today although sadly we'll only be using
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our Intel bench since time was not on our side like no joke we actually got
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our card 18 hours before this video was supposed to go live
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it's a good thing Anthony's a good sport about this kind of thing
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so with deus ex mankind divided we get a pretty big jump in performance over the
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gtx 1080. and that's pretty much the end of that
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chapter with the rest of our test suite getting just a few frames per second
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more regardless of whether we're looking at directx 11 or directx 12. 3dmark and
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unigine's superposition do let the 2070 stretch its legs a little bit more but
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overall we are in the same ballpark as our reference gtx 1080 and a factory
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overclocked 1080 would probably be on par when we hit it with our productivity
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workloads though like its bigger cousins the rtx 2070 delivers consistently good
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performance compared to the gtx 1080 of yesteryear making it quite comparable in
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most cases to even the rx vega 64. even
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in opencl tasks like luxmark that typically favor vega and in heavy
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lifting tasks like most but not all of specvuperf's professional rendering
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workloads it should of course be noted that most enthusiasts and professionals
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won't want to go for a reference card like this one preferring instead to opt
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for something like this strix but the
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thing is while normally these beefier
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custom cards quickly fall close to reference pricing
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this time it might take a while the 499
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msrp that NVIDIA has slapped onto reference cards allegedly has their
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partner selling these boards for basically no margin
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and why should you the consumer care about that
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well because as a result you can expect to pay closer to the founders edition
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599 price point for custom board cards
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for the foreseeable future and with this being the lowest tier of
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GPU with tensor cores and rtx support
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that means that 500 to 600
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will be the lowest point of entry for these technologies until NVIDIA delivers
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a 3 000 series refresh sometime in oh i don't know let's say 2022 at the rate
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that they're going so then rtx 2070 to buy or not to buy
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it's a really complicated question so let's start with the price
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on the surface it's not that much higher
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than the 1080 that it traded blows with in our benchmarks
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but msrp aside aggressive sale prices have
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1080s as low as 65 cheaper already and
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that's right now while we're working on this video before the 2070 has even
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launched so i would expect them to go lower still
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which means that what we need to determine then is if the features of the
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new gen justify the added expense
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some of them are pretty easy to evaluate like the improved nvenk encoder that
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outputs similar quality real-time capture to x264 fast with a negligible
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performance hit that's going to be a huge hit for anyone who game streams go
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for it other features well gets more
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complicated because surprise there is still
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no real rtx games there's no real
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content to set this thing apart from the last gen or even to measure how much of
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a performance impact that we might expect from the real-time ray tracing
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feature that NVIDIA is banking on so hard to sell these things that they put
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it right in the name
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further complicating the matter is the used market right now so with the recent
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cryptocurrency mining crash sites like ebay have been absolutely flooded with
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last generation high performance gpus and right now 1080 ti's which perform
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more like an rtx 2080 in conventional games can be had for the same price as
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an rtx 2070 and as we demonstrated in
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this video a used video card might not carry any warranty but it'll perform
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exactly the same after it's heavy use as it did when it was new we can't tell you
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not to buy an rtx 2070 because it's it's
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fine i guess but we can't tell you to
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buy it because its main selling points are still completely missing in action
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the only thing that we really can say conclusively today is that this launch
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from NVIDIA is all the evidence that we need to say that they absolutely require
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a competitor to keep their pricing in line rather than follow the it industry
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standard of mostly inflationary pricing increases
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that even Intel Intel maintained through the second to
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sixth generation core series processor launches
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remember this is when they had no competition from AMD to speak of NVIDIA
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has just kicked the convention to the curb instead of using the architectural
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improvements to deliver more bang for the buck to consumers NVIDIA has instead
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taken their new products and basically plonked them right down on top of the
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old ones so instead of taking the money that you had last year and getting more
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for it today you can get more but you will just need
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to shell out extra cash i mean the argument from NVIDIA might be
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that rtx is what adds more bang for those bucks
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but at this point i'm just being asked to take their word for it and i can't do
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that you know what i can do is tell you guys
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so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video then i'm sorry i'm
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sorry NVIDIA staff out there i mean we tried to be nice to it but like what are
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we supposed to say it's like faster video cards for more expensive it's not
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like a huge win for the average gamer maybe maybe
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non-rtx what is it going to be a gtx 2060 this is going to get really
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confusing so if you guys dislike this video you can hit that button but if you
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