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Palit RTX 2070 GameRock Premium 8GB Review

The Palit RTX 2070 GameRock Premium ships in a glossy black box, with the GameRock logo spilled across the front – there is no image of the card itself visible from the front.

Inside, included accessories are scarce – we find just a quick installation guide and driver disk.

The card itself is essentially the same cooler and shroud as we first saw with the RTX 2080 GameRock Premium back in October. In fact, as far as I can tell, the only way you could tell these cards apart is by the fact that the RTX 2070 has no NVLink connector and also slightly different power connectors – everything else looks identical between the two.

That means we have the same black, silver and dark grey shroud that is mostly made of plastic, though the grey sections on either end of the card are small metallic plates that have been screwed onto the shroud. The fans are the same 95mm units as well.

We can also confirm that the dimensions of both the RTX 2070 and RTX 2080 GameRock Premium cards are the same – measuring in at 292 x 130 x 59.6 mm, these are both very large, and to this day I have not reviewed a thicker card. You will definitely need three free expansions slots to fit this bad boy in your case.

The PCB is pretty easy to get to, only 8 screws need to be removed from the back of the card and then it is not much hassle to prise the heatsink off. The main things to note here are that Palit has upped the power phases, moving from 6+2 of the Founders Edition to its own 8+2 design.

The memory is supplied by Micron, with the chips labelled ‘8SA77D9WCW', while the GPU die is labelled TU106-400A which signifies that this is a binned chip that Nvidia's partners can sell with a factory overclock.

The heatsink is also identical to that of the GameRock Premium 2080, meaning it utilises 5 thick copper heatpipes – each of which looks like they measure 8mm in diameter – with a copper contact area for the GPU die. The VRAM and VRM also has a dedicated coldplate to aid heat dissipation, and there are plenty of thermal pads in a distinctive salmon colour.

On the front side of the card, we find a small silver GameRock logo which sits just below the almost imperceptible GeForce RTX branding. This card also has a dual-BIOS switch at the very front (just to the right of the I/O bracket), though strangely both BIOS have the same clock speed and fan curve, and the only difference is that BIOS 2 enables the ‘zero dB' mode, whereas BIOS 1 keeps the fans spinning continuously.

The backplate design has not changed from the GameRock Premium 2080 either, and that means it still has the big GameRock logo printed in that Guitar Hero font taking up almost the entirety of the right-hand side. I have to say this is not my cup of tea personally, though aesthetics is obviously subjective so I will leave how big of an issue this is up to you.

In terms of power connectors, this 2070 requires 1x 6-pin and 1x 8-pin, marking only the second difference between this card and the Palit 2080 that I have spotted.

Display outputs are pretty standard for this generation of cards, though, with 3x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.0b and 1x USB-C (VirtualLink) connectors.

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