That's just $10 shy of the much more powerful 5070 Ti's official MSRP. So, exactly what are you getting for the $190 price hike? That's very hard to say. Asus currently lists the card's boost clock as "TBD", while Best Buy quotes it at 2.3 GHz, which has to be wrong as that's below the reference clocks and this is an "overclocked" card.
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The reality is that factory overclocked cards are rarely if ever sufficiently upclocked that you'd ever feel the difference actually in-game. So, for the most part this is likely just a very expensive RTX 5070.
That said, Asus isn't the only one at this game. The Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5070 Aorus Master 12G GDDR7 is also listed at $739 on Best Buy. For that one we do at least have a boost clock figure of 2.715 GHz versus the 2.512 GHz of the reference RTX 5070.
As factory overclocked cards go, that's a decent uptick. But it's still only 8% more clock speed, which in turn probably won't translate into fully 8% more frames in game, it virtually never does. Either way, it's a single-digit percentage uplift and you're not going to feel that subjectively.
In between those top and bottom priced RTX 5070s, you'll find another six MSRP+ priced 5070 GPUs from Gigabyte, Asus and PNY. Exactly how fast they sell out, if any, most or all of them will actually go on sale, well, we'll have to wait and see.
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Nvidia has made positive noises about RTX 5070 supply. So, there's a slither of hope that maybe, just maybe, there will be some availability of MSRP-priced RTX 5070s. There'd better be as the RTX 5070 is just barely appealing at $549. For anything higher, it's a massive turn off.
As I write these words, we're just under two hours from the RTX 5070 going on sale and you can track all the developments on our RTX 5070 Launch Day Live page. Keep your scanners peeled!
Jeremy has been writing about technology and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google it!) and enjoys nothing more than a serious dissertation on the finer points of monitor input lag and overshoot followed by a forensic examination of advanced lithography. Or maybe he just likes machines that go “ping!” He also has a thing for tennis and cars.
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