Nvidia Geforce RTX 2070 Super prices have been choppy over the past month, after the RTX 3080 launch, along with many of the 20-series cards. It’s fair to say there’ll be plenty of deals when Amazon Prime Day and Black Friday come around, so here at PC Gamer, we've been attempting to weigh up which cards are actually worth splashing out on before the Coca Cola truck comes around. We've done a run around, so you can kick back and enjoy your new PC build or upgrade, and have a stress free holiday—if such a thing is even possible.
With the new 30-series cards now out in the wild (rare as they may be), the question remains: is it worth snapping up a 1st generation RTX card like the 2070 Super at this late stage in the game, or should you wait to invest in a shiny 2nd-gen card? Nvidia have played a very strategic card here, but don't worry, we're here to help you answer important questions like these.
If you’re harboring an old-style Nvidia card, looking out at the cool kids with their ‘RTX on’, and wondering what the fuss is about, you’re going to need to make a tough decision. We’ve seen the RTX 2070 Super benchmarks, now it’s time to decide if the 1st-gen RTX card is going to be your supportive new BFF at the turn of a new age of silicon, or if it’ll only hold you back.
What is the Nvidia RTX 2070 Super?
Release date - July 19
GPU - Turing TU104
Lithography - 12nm
CUDA cores - 2,560
Base clock - 1,605MHz
Memory capacity - 8GB
Launch price - $499
The Geforce RTX 2070 Super is part of the first-generation of RTX graphics cards, released in July 2019. It came along nine months after the RTX 2070, but at the same price point of $499, and with around a 10-15% performance increase on its predecessor. The RTX 2070 Super spits out boots of up to 1770MHz, and comes packing 40 streaming multiprocessors, each with 1 RT core, 8 Tensor cores, 64 CUDA cores and 4 Texture units—essentially it’s a trimmed down version of the RTX 2080.
What are the alternatives to the Nvidia RTX 2070 Super?
The main alternative to the RTX 2070 super is the AMD RX Radeon 5700 XT. You’ll be getting a substantial saving with this one, but it doesn’t come close to outperforming it’s Nvidia counterpart, with around a 14% average score difference on 3D mark TimeSpy benchmarks. Alternatively a GeForce RTX 2070 would probably do the trick, if you’re after some bigger savings. But realistically both of those still suffer by comparison to the RTX 3070, and the mainstream GPUs that will follow it.
Should I buy the Nvidia RTX 2070 Super and at what price?
Unless the price is right, the answer has to be no. Stock is likely to be a little tight around Black Friday and Prime day, because they're no longer in production and many will be counting on the 20-series prices to drop substantially in light of the recent 30-series launch.
At the end of the day, considering the new RTX 3070 is coming in with basically RTX 2080 Ti levels of performance, at only $500, you wouldn't want to spend any more than $300 on an RTX 2070 Super, if and when the deals come rolling around. And it's unlikely they'll ever appear that cheap at retail. Then you've also got to consider what you'll get out of the prospective RTX 3060 or 3060 Ti when those follow.
