INTRODUCTION

   Ever since i got my hands on the very first "3D" cards like the Riva 128 by NVIDIA, the Voodoo by 3DFX and the 3D Rage by ATI to get released back in the mid 90's I’ve been fascinated by 3D graphics (who remembers playing the very first Need For Speed and Command & Conquer games back then?). Fast forward almost 25 years later and thanks to the never-ending competition between AMD (bought ATI back in 2006) and NVIDIA not only are graphics cards getting much more powerful but they are also equipped with impressive technologies aimed to make your gaming experience more exciting like FreeSync, G-Sync, real time ray tracing and deep learning super sampling. Now as some of you are well aware i decided to cease graphics card reviews a while back but since many of you have asked i decided to give it another go and so today we start that effort by taking a very close look at the AORUS GeForce RTX 2070 Super card by GIGABYTE.

   GIGABYTE is an engineer, visionary, and leader in the world of tech that uses its hardware expertise, patented innovations, and industry leadership to create, inspire, and advance. Renowned for over 30 years of award-winning excellence, GIGABYTE is a cornerstone in the HPC community, providing businesses with server and data center expertise to accelerate their success. At the forefront of evolving technology, GIGABYTE is devoted to invent smart solutions that enable digitalization from edge to cloud, and allow customers to capture, analyze, and transform digital information into economic data that can benefit humanity and "Upgrade Your Life".

   The latest GeForce RTX 2070 Super card is NVIDIA's answer to the RX 5700 series by AMD which matched and, in some cases, even surpassed the performance of the previous RTX 2070 model. In order to achieve the extra performance NVIDIA this time over used a cut down version of the Turing TU104 GPU (instead of the TU106) which is also found in the more powerful RTX 2080/2080 Super models. Just for the record the GeForce RTX 2070 Super features a total of 2560 shader units, 40 RT cores, 184 texture units, 320 tensor cores and 13.6 Billion transistors whereas the previous GeForce RTX 2070 featured a total of 2304 shader units, 36 RT cores, 144 texture units, 288 tensor cores and a total of 10.8 Billion transistors. Core boost clocks also vary since the new GeForce RTX 2070 Super is set at up to 1770MHz whereas the GeForce RTX 2070 came with a core clock of up to 1620MHz (reference cards always). On the other hand, probably in an effort to cut-down costs NVIDIA didn't touch the memory end of the new cards so both the RTX 2070 Super and the RTX 2070 feature 8GB of 256-bit GDDR6 memory at 14Gbps with a bandwidth of 448GB/s. Even though the GeForce RTX 2070 Super was announced back in July of last year so it already counts 3 months in the market the AORUS model we have here today by GIGABYTE counts a lot less and not only features an improved 3-fan cooling system (3x100mm halo fans) complete with impressive RGB effects and a rear backplate but it also sports a total of 7 outputs (3xHDMI v2.0b/3xDP v1.4a/1xUSB-C), 12+2 power phases for extreme overclocking and comes with a GPU boost factory overclock of 1905MHz.