Nvidia has reportedly been working on a GeForce RTX 4070 card with even less VRAM than the original 12GB version. According to leaked images, a 10GB Nvidia RTX 4070 card was doing the rounds during the GPU's development, with quite a different spec from the 12GB card. Nvidia has come under a lot of flak for not supplying its powerful GPUs with enough VRAM, but if these pictures are legitimate, the RTX 4070 could have been even more unbalanced.
In terms of the core spec, this leaked Nvidia RTX 4070 10GB card has quite a lot in common with the new RTX 4070 Super, which is the current top recommendation on our guide to the best graphics card. In particular, it looks as though the 10GB RTX 4070 was supplied with 7,168 CUDA cores, which is the same number as the new RTX 4070 Super card, while the original RTX 4070 only has 5,888 CUDA cores enabled.
There are some strange specs choices lurking in the purported CPU-Z screenshot for this card. For example, the 10GB of GDDR6X VRAM is attached to a narrow 160-bit memory bus, compared to the 192-bit bus on the ostensibly less powerful RTX 4070.
Nvidia could have used a 320-bit bus, as found on the original RTX 3080, but instead only used a 160-bit bus for this 10GB RTX 4070 card, resulting in a total memory bandwidth of just 420GB/s. That's a fair bit lower than the 504.2GB/s on the final RTX 4070, and much lower than the 760.3GB/s on the RTX 3080 10GB.
The CPU-Z screenshot was revealed in a post on X (formerly Twitter) by Korean PC tech enthusiast harukaze5719, along with a photo of the purported card. This shows what looks like a typical Nvidia Founders Edition PCB, with the semi-circle cutaway in the PCB for Nvidia's flow-through cooler. However, there are only five 2GB GDDR6X memory chips surrounding the GPU. It looks as though this is an Nvidia sample, rather than a PCB from a board partner, and it also has the standard Nvidia 12VHPWR connector at the top.
Back in 2022, before the final card was released, early RTX 4070 rumors pointed to it being based on an AD104-275 GPU, and coming equipped with 10GB of VRAM. It looks as though Nvidia quickly decided that 10GB of VRAM wasn't enough for the new card, and that it needed a fatter memory bus, although it's baffling why it also decided to cut down the number of enabled CUDA cores. There's no indication of when the pictured GPU came out, other than a driver date of April 11, 2024, but we suspect this sample came out much earlier than this date.
If you're on the lookout for a mid-range GPU, now is a great time to pick up a bargain, as this RTX 4070 deal enables you to pick up this card for just $499.99 right now. If you've never upgraded your graphics card before, then make sure you also check out our guide on how to build a gaming PC, where we take you through the whole process, including installing a new GPU.
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