**March 2019 Update - Still working fantastically 3 months later. No artifacting, no crashing. Playing Apex Legends at 4K at around 80fps on med/high. 144fps easily at 1080p. Overclocks just fine. Stays cool just fine.
I went for this upgrade when the Strix 2070 was on sale for $584 on Black Friday weekend. So far I have been completely happy with it, especially coming from a Strix 970. The 970 wasn't quite keeping up with the new 2560x1080 ultra-wide 144hz monitor I bought a few months ago. It has worked just fine with a 650w Gold PSU. Paired with a 4790k, Z97-A board, and 16 GB of DDR3 RAM (yeah, more upgrades are due in the future).
The card came completely new in it's original sealed box and has been working flawlessly since installing it (No issues with a used card or tampered packaging). Performance has been about what I was expecting with about a 1.8x-2x jump/improvement over the 970. Witcher 3 Ultra/Max was seeing 120-130 fps in most places outside of the cities and 90-100 fps in larger cities. FFXV Ultra/Max with TRAM set to High was seeing 80-100 fps depending on how many enemies/people were around. I haven't had the chance to test many other games yet though (too busy with work right now). Running the GPU User Benchmark test while overclocked to +100 core and +300 memory results in usually a 140% - 141% rating which isn't bad compared to the average of 133%.
Cooling is typical from what I'd expect from a Strix card. I haven't yet seen it cross over 68-70 degrees on games before the fans spool up (quietly; they're not noticeable to me with the sound from games) and cool everything back off to the 55-60-ish range. I setup the Asus Aura RGB software and have it set to cycle through all colors which gives a cool 'glow' to the entire case. I'm not a super hardcore gamer, a miner or a graphic designer so I was mainly looking for an upgrade that would simply 'keep up' with any game I try to play with between high and max settings while being future proof for at least 2 more years... and you never really know where ray-tracing or DLSS may be going in the future, so that's a 'nice to have' feature for now.
tl;dr: Upgrading from a 3.5+ year old Strix 970 was 100% worth it for ultra-wide 1080p 144hz gaming. If I were on anything higher than a 970, I most likely would have skipped out on the 2070 until prices dropped down.
| Memory Speed | 14000 MHz |
|---|---|
| Graphics Coprocessor | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 |
| Chipset Brand | RTX 2070 |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 8 GB |
