NVIDIA’s official pricing places the GeForce RTX 4070 Super under the $600 mark. However, board partner variants are priced between $600 and $649, with the top-end SKU going as high as $699. The Gigabyte RTX 4070 Super Aorus Master is one such flagship. It’s priced $100 higher than the Founders Edition and at least $50 more than the GPU’s average price. What for you ask? It has a higher boost clock and a much higher power limit to go along with it. (Source: TechPowerUp)
While the GeForce RTX 4070 Super Founders Edition has a 2475MHz boost clock, the Aorus Master boosts as high as 2655MHz out of the box. Furthermore, the Gigabyte card has a maximum power limit of 350W, up from 240W on the FE and most other AIC variants.
The increased power limit allows the Aorus Master to boost higher and for longer durations (if allowed by thermals). However, the performance gained by this massive power headroom is a paltry 5%, as that’s the relative delta between the RTX 4070 Super FE and the Aorus Master.
The Gigabyte RTX 4070 Super Aorus Master recorded an average GPU clock of 2,944MHz after overclocking, only 69MHz higher than the Founders Edition. Unsurprisingly, this paltry uplift confers a meaningless lead of 4 FPS or 5% over the reference model.
This observation highlights the faltering viability of pricey factory-overclocked graphics cards that advertise significantly higher operating clocks but deliver trivial gains in most cases. You’d do well to opt for the stock variants.
