While it’s not a bad graphics card, the PNY RTX 4070 Super XLR8 doesn’t bring anything extra to Ada’s soda party. This 30MHz overclock doesn’t offer extra frame rates and the cooler is just as effective as Nvidia’s reference version. But it is still an RTX 4070 Super, which means it’s a wonderful 1440p card, possibly worth no more than the $599 MSRP.
The RTX 4070 Super is the first of Nvidia’s updated Ada GPUs to hit the market, and there are two more on the market this month. We covered the new chip in-depth in my Nvidia RTX 4070 Super review of Founders Edition, but we also have an overclocked edition to play with, here in the form of the PNY RTX 4070 Super XLR8.
Or, to use its absurd title, PNY GeForce RTX 4070 Super 12GB XLR8 Gaming VERTO EPIC-X RGB Overclocked Triple Fan edition.
Truth be told, I consider factory-overclocked versions of popular graphics cards to be a tricky proposition. A long time ago, in a games industry that feels so far away, this made a certain amount of sense. Your graphics card had a set clock speed, and to get anything more than that, you had to overclock your card, digging into the settings yourself, or pay the manufacturer to do it at the factory level.
And sometimes it was worth spending more money to get a little more functionality out of your GPU, as the manufacturer might have a fast cooler and special overclocking equipment to get the most out of the silicon. It would also give you the confidence to take this overclocking even further and push harder on a factory overclocked card, knowing that you have the power and cooling parts to make it all possible.
That’s not a big factor now that we have dynamic clock speeds, which are replaced on the fly depending on cooling or how much force needs to be applied to the GPU. You can even connect this to your specific chip with Nvidia’s OC scanner. This is an automatic feature that tests other degrees of force to supply an express voltage curve to your own silicon.
All of this means that graphics cards are already necessarily pushing the boundaries of the imaginable with every GPU and within certain power limits. Which also makes factory-overclocked cards less and less relevant. And honestly, they have been for generations.
We covered the AD104 specs of the RTX 4070 Super in our main review, but suffice it to say that you get a healthy increase in core count (from 5888 to 7168 CUDA cores) and a bit of extra L2 cache. everything else is necessarily the same as the RTX 4070 which unfortunately doesn’t get fully upgraded, i. e. 12GB of GDDR6X on a 192-bit memory bus and a 2475MHz acceleration clock. The RTX 4070 Super’s base clock has been upgraded to a nominal 60 MHz to the reference RTX 4070 GPU, but honestly, that doesn’t matter when it comes to dynamic clock speeds.
The base clock of this PNY RTX 4070 Super XLR8 remains the same, at 1,980 MHz, but where it differs is in the spicy clock. In this case, its factory overclock is 30 MHz. Yes, only 30 MHz. That’s how it is with factory overclocks those days; Therefore, its most expensive card has a boost clock of 2505 MHz. In dollar terms, this probably also equates to the same price increase. Ahead of launch, I don’t have a final price for this model, but I’m looking at other overclocked RTXs. 4070 Super cards, probably $630.
So, should you be willing to pay a dollar for each extra MHz added on to your card’s boost clock out of the box? Absolutely not. In no way is there any benefit to the end user in paying the extra for a factory overclocked card like this, especially not compared to the lovely-looking Nvidia Founders Edition version.
Should you be willing to pay a dollar for each extra MHz added on to your card’s boost clock out of the box? Absolutely not.
In my own tests, the PNY card runs on average 3% faster at 1080p, 0. 28% faster at 1440p, and about 1% slower at 4K. Basically, it has almost the same functionality for your money. But will it be cooler and quieter? It’s not strong indeed, but I wouldn’t say it’s another one from the reference edition either. But it’s much warmer. It’s only a few degrees, but the three-fan PNY cooler isn’t as effective at cooling chips as the over-engineered matte black Nvidia cover.
In short, don’t buy the PNY RTX 4070 Super XLR8 expecting to see functionality benefits, whether it’s frame rate, cooling, or noise levels.
Sometimes, our recommendation remains the same for all Nvidia GPU releases with a Founders Edition card: if you find one, buy the reference GeForce card every time. They are guaranteed to sell at MSRP and are among the best-performing versions of the cards.
But they do sell out, for that very reason, and so you’re often left with a choice of third-party cards. Yet I would still say your best bet is to find a GPU sitting at Nvidia’s MSRP rather than spending the extra for the ephemeral benefits of a factory overclocked option.
Spending over $600 on an RTX 4070 Super is a bit of a tough sell, especially when you still have the older RTX 4070 at a much less expensive price. When it costs about $100 less and only 10% slower, the old Ada is still a very tempting prospect.
If your only option is a more expensive $30 OC version, you probably won’t suffer from having the PNY RTX 4070 Super XLR8 in your rig. The cooler is still effective and quiet, and the updated AD104 GPU is an impressive slice of graphics silicon. , offers gaming functionality just below an RTX 4070 Ti and, at a generational level, even surpasses the previous RTX 3080 Ti. You get the dual benefits of DLSS and frame generation, and it’s also an incredibly effective graphics card.
Just, y’know, don’t expect any extra performance from your new card’s modest 30MHz overclock.
Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he’s back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.
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