Intro

The EVGA RTX 2070 Black Gaming Edition Benchmarked with 38 Games

The GeForce RTX 2070 is the third GPU based on NVIDIA’s Turing architecture represented by EVGA’s RTX 2070 Black. The RTX 2070 is similar to the RTX 2080 that we reviewed last month although it is less powerful. It is also considerably less expensive at $499 compared with the GTX 1080 which launched at $699 for entry-level partner cards and at $799 for the reference Founder’s Edition .

The Black is EVGA’s stock-clocked entry-level RTX 2070 card and it costs $100 less than the built-by-NVIDIA reference Founder’s Edition, and many RTX 2070 versions will be available for purchase tomorrow. The Black’s Boost Clock is at 1620 MHz and EVGA offers 3 other more expensive SKUs that offer up to 1815 MHz Boost for the EVGA RTX 2070 FTW3 Ultra Gaming card.

Instead of repeating all of the same information in our RTX 2080 launch review, we will highlight the differences between the RTX 2070 and the RTX 2080, and then we will focus on performance by benchmarking it with a similar but expanded benching suite including Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey to see how capable it is.

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We will pay particular attention to the RTX 2070 Black’s performance versus its main and higher-priced competitor, the $599 PowerColor Red Devil Vega 56, and versus the GTX 1080 which is in the $460-$599 price range. We will also compare its performance with the RTX 2080, the GTX 1070 that it replaces, and will measure how far it has progressed versus the GTX 980, at 1920×1080, 2560×1440, and even at 3840×2160 to see if it is suitable for gaming at 4K.

The RTX 2070 is not based on the same TU104 GPU used in the GeForce GTX 2080, but it uses its own GPU, the TU106. The GeForce RTX 2070 supports all of the same new features that NVIDIA’s Turing architecture brings including RTX ray tracing and DLSS. The EVGA RTX 2070 Black as well as the reference RTX 2070 features 2304 CUDA Cores, 36 RT Cores, 288 Tensor Cores, and a GPU Boost clock speed of 1620 MHz. A Founders Edition version will be offered directly from NVIDIA’s online store that ships with a 90 MHz overclock, and we will review it here by tomorrow morning

The memory 256-bit subsystem of GeForce RTX 2070 uses eight 32-bit memory controllers for 8 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory providing up to 448 GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth. Pixel shading is handled by 64 ROP Units with a peak Pixel Fill Rate of 109.4 Gigapixels/second for the RTX 2070 Founders Edition and slightly less for the EVGA RTX 2070 Black. The GeForce RTX 2070 has 144 Texture Units that provide a Texture Rate of 246.2 Gigatexels/second. Here is a table illustrating the differences between the stock RTX 2070 and the GTX 1070.

BTR received a RTX 1070 Black from EVGA last week, and for the past three days since we got the launch drivers on Friday, we have put it through its paces using 38 games. We are testing all of our competing cards on a clean installation of Windows 10 64-bit Home edition, using Core i7-8700K with all six cores overclocked to 4.7 GHz by the BIOS, and 16GB of Kingston’s 3333 MHz DDR4.

Key Features of the EVGA RTX 2070 Black

Here is a chart which sums up the specifications, features, and requirements of the EVGA RTX 2070 Black.

EVGA offers a 3 year warranty for the Black Edition that can be extended by registering on their site, and their warranty service is second to none in our experience.

The EVGA RTX 2070 Black Edition Images

We usually perform an unboxing, however, the RTX 2070 Black arrived in a box that EVGA says is not final, so we are using the box image they supplied and some others besides our own.

It’s a relatively large box compared with the Founders Edition boxes, and one corner is notched, probably for artistic reasons and to stand out from the usual rectangular boxes.

Here is the EVGA RTX 2070 Black.

Here it is from another angle.

Looking straight down we can see the large heatsink through the fan blades and translucent gray plastic shroud.

Here is the obverse. It doesn’t come with any backplate as befits an entry-level card.

Turning it on its edge, we can see that the EVGA RTX 2070 Black has a rather large heatsinks.

The connectors consist of two DisplayPorts, a HDMI connector, a DVI connector, the new NVIDIA Type-C/VirtualLink connector that may be especially useful for upcoming HMD VR connections, and a DVI port.

It looks great inside of our EVGA DG-77 case but we did not have time to vertically mount it.

Before we explore overclocking and then performance testing, let’s take a closer look at our test configuration.