At first glance, the price positioning of the RTX 4070 would have come as a surprise to some of Nvidia’s partner brands. Obviously, when you consider the price difference between a 4070 and a 4070Ti you realize that the jump is huge. Rumors claim that NVIDIA initially planned to launch the RTX 4070 at $749 ($50 below the 4070Ti) before deciding to position this card at $599. In addition, in order to avoid market grumbling as much as possible, team green have imposed on their partners to inject 50% of the volume of cards at the launch price ($599) into the market. So, contrary to what we have seen so far with the RTX 40 series, many “entry-level” cards are available at resellers. If the overall reception of the RTX 4070 is rather good, some feedbacks talk about overheating on some models.
Savings to keep the MSRP?
But it has been noticed that in order to keep this price, several brands would have saved a lot of money by equipping the boards with poor quality heat sinks and using cheap VRMs. A blatant example was highlighted on a 4070 design using a plastic structure as a backplate, resulting in an obvious lack of rigidity. The immediate consequence would be a bad contact of the cooling system with the GPU or VRMs. Because when the card is installed in your PC horizontally, the weight of the heatsink causes the contact surface with the VRMs in particular to become detached. Some people have reported temperatures of up to 106ºC.
However, it is not possible to speculate on future reliability problems, as most components, depending on the manufacturer, are certified to go up to 120ºC or 140ºC. Fortunately, not all the boards launched at MSRP are in this case. Several manufacturers have managed to create efficient heatsinks and backplanes. It is likely that they are not making money from these references, but given the apathy of the market, this effort seems wise to us. We will continue to test several RTX 4070s and will pay attention to this information in our upcoming tests.
