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Nvidia’s RTX 4070 could have lower power consumption levels than previously rumored, and further chatter on the topic of this graphics card suggests some seriously fast clock speeds, meaning it could be a really powerful GPU.
All this new info comes from a prolific source on Twitter, Kopite7kimi, who previously asserted that the RTX 4070 would consume 300W.
We can expect RTX 4080 with 320W and RTX 4070 with 285W.August 9, 2022
Based on some fresh tweets (apply liberal seasoning, naturally), Nvidia is attempting to reduce that power usage – viewing it as problematic, apparently, and Team Green wasn’t the only one thinking that, which is perhaps part of the reasoning for this move – and the target for the RTX 4070 has been rejigged to 285W, while the RTX 4080 has dropped heavily from 420W to 320W, apparently.
In a further tweet (opens in new tab), Kopite7kimi informs us of the clock speeds of the RTX 4070, which will supposedly be set at a base clock of 2310MHz and boost of 2610MHz, with maximum clocks set to be capable of exceeding 2.8GHz.
Analysis: The ever-spinning GPU rumor mill might make you dizzy
With those clock speeds, which are a big step up from the RTX 3070, this again suggests an RTX 4070 that’ll be the equal of the RTX 3090 Ti – something we’ve heard from the rumor mill before, and a seriously promising leap in performance for a more affordable Lovelace GPU. It’s also quite possibly why we’ve recently seen some big price drops on the RTX 3090 Ti, which may look quite overshadowed when these next-gen graphics cards arrive.
If the RTX 4070 can achieve this at 285W power usage – which is a big old if – that’s not a huge uplift compared to the 220W of the RTX 3070, or at least it’s not given that purported 3090 Ti level of performance. Particularly when you consider that the RTX 3090 Ti requires a whopping 450W – that rather puts things into perspective here.
The supposed drop down to 320W for the 4080 is huge news, too, and Kopite7kimi assures us that it won’t lead to much in the way of slower performance for the GPU (adding that there’ll be plenty of overclocking headroom for RTX 4080 buyers, which would make sense given this new wattage).
It’s entirely possible that Nvidia’s intention was always to run with these more reasonable sounding power figures, and previous rumors were picking up on earlier testing configurations (or maybe were just plain wrong, or exaggerated). At any rate, power consumption is certainly seeming a more palatable affair with these Lovelace graphics cards – although 320W for the RTX 4080 sounds a bit too good to be true, given that this is what the RTX 3080 demands. We shall see.
Another interesting final point here is that VideoCardz, which spotted the above tweets (1 (opens in new tab), 2 (opens in new tab)), also flagged up a further tweet from KittyYYuko (opens in new tab) (the leaker formerly known as KittyCorgi) pointing to a new potential Lovelace model. This is loaded with 14,848 CUDA Cores and 20GB of GDDR6X VRAM, and theoretically could be an early sighting of an RTX 4080 Ti (though it could be a lot of things, including a workstation GPU – if anything at all).