Nvidia 4070 mini review and thoughts

This card looks to be the best value, or perhaps the least bad of the line. With the consoles having moved to 16 GB in total, we see that 8 GB really doesn't cut it anymore except for truly entry-level gaming, so the 4060 Ti and 4060 look to be a horrible buy that will struggle to even play many newer games at 1080p at higher settings. The 12 GB of the 4070 is hopefully sufficient for a while, although there is still a significant risk that you'll be held back by a lack of VRAM. I definitely would not pay extra for the 4070 Ti, because with such an expensive card, I'd certainly demand 16 GB.

The best trait of the 4070 is its efficiency. It is extremely power efficient and depending on how often you game and how much your electricity costs, this can save significant money. Nvidia is also more efficient in idle compared to AMD, so you save money there as well, if you have your PC on for a long time.

Unfortunately, Igor's Lab has shown that AIBs use rather poor quality components in many of the MSRP cards, so despite the relatively low power draw, you can get hotspots on the card of over 100 degrees Celsius. This is at a level that is not lethal for the card in the short term, but can definitely reduce the longevity of the card significantly. We've seen that the reference model has better build quality than the cheapest AIB cards, so it might be a good idea to get that one, if you can. The more expensive AIB models are a bit of a joke, with overclocks that make them just 1 or 2 percent faster. Anyway, for these kinds of prices I don't appreciate the level of cost cutting that is done. With Moore's law slowing down, people are probably going to keep their hardware for longer, so longevity is more important.

I haven't seen any tests with different power limits for the 4070, but both Nvidia and AMD have been shipping cards that are very much overclocked out of the box and can be made much more efficient with fairly little power loss by lowering the power limit. And an undervolt can of course also help reduce power even more, with no cost to performance. So if you don't mind tweaking, you may be able to get the card to be quieter and more efficient with a small performance loss. 

Ultimately, this card performs similar to the 3080 for a price that is slightly lower than the MSRP of the 3080, which is not exactly great progress. We've seen in the past that the poor reception of the 2000-series, resulted in Nvidia providing a huge improvement for the 3000-series. So this may be a generation to skip if you can, or at least wait for price drops. Nvidia doesn't seem to like those, but with the apparently very poor sales, it's hard to imagine that they won't have to. Still, it's hard to imagine that we'll see truly good value for money from Nvidia this generation.