ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER BTF White OC Edition Review – Look Ma, No Cables!

The GPU we’re reviewing today is an interesting one, but let’s get the name out of a way first, because it’s a mouthful. Here goes: “ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER BTF White OC Edition” – that’s 12 words, 51 letters in total. Pay close attention to the word soup you will find the three letter “BTF” in the name, and if you’re familiar with recent DIY PC news you’ll know this denotes the new cable-less design. In this review, we’ll look at this GPU and see what’s good, and what’s not so good about it.

Click here to purchase the ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER BTF White OC Edition via Shopee

Unboxing

The packaging is very much the same as any other TUF GPUs (see RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Ti we previously reviewed), albeit now in a white shade of paint. Lift open the inner box and you greet the rather sizeable GPU, plus a few accessories tucked in a separate cutout.

These are all the items laid out (including all the papers from the dedicated packaging), and one thing you’ll notice is the lack of a PCIe 8-pin splitter commonly found in RTX 40 GPUs. It doesn’t need one – as all the power delivery duties are handled by a second connector next to the PCIe connector, hence no cables are needed. That aside, you’ll still be getting all the usual items that comes with a TUF GPU.

Walkaround

The TUF BTF GPU (we’ll shorten the name from here on) has the same design as the regular TUF GPUs, with the same counter-rotating triple-fan configuration and the same fan blade profiles with two distinct curvatures along the edge. Despite its relatively modest 285W power draw, the footprint is rather huge at 305 x 138 x 65 mm (3.25-slot), which is certainly overkill as far as cooling is concerned.

Here, we can see the unique feature of this GPU: since it uses the GC-HPWR (HPCE) bus connector for power, there is no 12VHPWR connector housed on the top side of this card. The density of heatsink is also less cramped compared to other cards (say, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX), which demands less work from the fan to push the air through it, and potentially less noise as a result. On the bottom side you can see two cables painted white, which is a nice touch.

Taking a look up close we can see the usual DIP switch that handles the vBIOS profile, as well as the GC-HPWR connector (as ASUS calls it) responsible for delivering 285W to the GPU. From what we can tell, this is derived from the server-grade HPCE connector, though we think this is a modified version or at least a different variant. We know from previous leaks that ASUS is calling this HPCE connector internally, but officially it’ll be referred as GC-HPWR (Graphics Card-High Power) instead.

It’s business as usual for the I/O, featuring three DisplayPort 1.4 outputs and two HDMI 2.1 outputs – here you also can see the sheer thickness of this card despite having ‘only’ 285W TDP to work with.

Like all TUF cards, the RGB lighting remains on the same spot which is customizable via ASUS’s Armoury Crate app. It certainly looks cleaner as no cables are getting in the way now, isn’t it?

Specifications

ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER BTF White OC Edition

GPU Core & VRAM: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER
GPU Core Variant	AD103-275-A1
Microarchitecture	Ada Lovelace
Process Node	TSMC N4 (5nm)
Transistors	45.9 billion
Die size	379mm²
Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs)	66
CUDA Cores	8448
Tensor Cores	264
RT Cores	66
Cache	48MB L2
VRAM Configuration	16GB GDDR6X 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	21Gbps, 672GB/s peak
Add-in board: ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER BTF White OC Edition
Boost Clocks	Quiet mode: 2640MHz Performance mode: 2670MHz
TDP	285W
Factory Recommended PSU	750W
Dual BIOS Mode	Yes, Performance/Quiet
Display Outputs	3x DisplayPort 1.4 2x HDMI 2.1 *Max output resolution: 7680×4320@60Hz
Power Connector	GC-HPWR (HPCE) backside connector
Bus Interface	PCIe 4.0 x16
Dimensions	3.25-slot, 305 x 138 x 65 mm

Click here to purchase the ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER BTF White OC Edition via Shopee

Test System

CPU	Intel Core i9-13900K
Cooling	ASUS ROG Ryujin II 360 Cooler Master MasterGel Maker
Motherboard	ASUS TUF Gaming Z790-BTF WIFI
GPU	ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER BTF White OC Edition
Memory	Kingston FURY RENEGADE RGB DDR5-6400 CL32 (2x16GB)
Storage	Samsung SSD 980 PRO 256GB (Boot) Kingston NV1 1TB
Power Supply	Cooler Master MWE Gold 1250 V2 Full Modular 1250W
Case	ASUS TUF Gaming GT302 ARGB
Operating System	Windows 11 Home 23H2

Performance

All benchmarks are done in out-of-the-box settings unless otherwise specified. Games are tested under these settings (upscaling features such as NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, or Intel XeSS are turned off unless otherwise specified):

• Forza Horizon 5 (RT ON)
  Maximum settings (all settings maxed out to EXTREME preset when available, Ray Tracing set to EXTREME).
• Forza Horizon 5 (RT OFF)
  Ultra High preset – Ray Tracing turned off.
• Red Dead Redemption 2
  All settings are set to ULTRA – slightly higher quality over ‘Favor Quality’ from the in-game settings slider.
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider (RT ON)
  HIGHEST preset. RT Shadows set to ULTRA (which overrides default Shadow settings).
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider (RT OFF)
  Same as the previous run – except RT Shadows turned OFF, with Shadow settings set to ULTRA instead.
• F1 2022 (RT ON)
  ULTRA HIGH preset. Ray Tracing is set to HIGH under this preset.

Synthetic Benchmarks

For the benchmarks we’re pitting the TUF BTF card against the ZOTAC RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Trinity Black (non-overclocked variant), and the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT for good measure. The factory overclock (+60MHz under Performance BIOS over stock) does squeeze out a tiny bit more points across all of our synthetic benchmarks here, but functionally both SUPER cards are on the same performance category.

Gaming – 4K (3840 x 2160)

Moving on to gaming in 4K resolution – the TUF RTX 4070 Ti SUPER BTF OC has consistently outperformed the ZOTAC counterpart by a few frames, where the biggest jump is seen on SOTTR with a virtually indiscernible 3-frame lead. It’s a back-and-forth against the Radeon GPU, with the TUF scoring bigger lead with games that involve ray tracing (Forza is the exception as it works better on Radeon cards).

Gaming – 1440p (2560 x 1440)

Same trend here between all three GPUs in this 1440p comparison, though the gap in SOTTR (RT off) has given the TUF card a bigger lead with 9 FPS advantage. It scores the biggest lead over the Radeon card with the SOTTR RT run, with a 38% lead in framerate.

Gaming – 1080p (1920 x 1080)

On 1080p, the TUF BTF card scores big wins on the bottom three benchmarks, while AMD scored small wins on the first three. Generally, it’s easy to pull 144FPS+ framerates at this resolution, though certain games may still punish this GPU hard if you crank the settings high enough (i.e. Cyberpunk 2077).

Thermals

The takeaway from these graphs are straightforward – just flip the switch to Performance BIOS, because there are so little difference between the two modes that you’re better off getting that extra +30MHz boost with the similarly indiscernible amounts of fan speed increase that come along with it. In both cases, the GPU fans settle at ~1,500RPM when the GPU is fully loaded for 10 minutes, though Performance BIOS does skip that tiny “shift” around the 1,000RPM range that Quiet BIOS use.

In a more gaming-like scenario, we can see bigger variance in the temperatures compared to Furmark, but the thermal performance is equally impressive. The GPU core barely got past 60°C, while the VRAM and hotspot temps are nowhere near the thermal limit that is only applicable to the core temperatures.

Software

For ASUS GPUs, you’re looking at GPU Tweak III which is responsible for overclocking and fan tuning. You can leave the card stock as it is as ours run perfectly fine (we have no particular complaints about it), but you have the option to squeeze a bit more frames out of the GPU if you need it. (Note: the app haven’t got around the scaling issues on high-DPI displays so it may look blurry if your system uses 125% or higher UI scaling factor.)

Conclusion

Let’s address one big asterisk of this GPU first: you can’t use it in any other motherboard except for exactly three today, and they are ASUS TUF B760-BTF, ASUS TUF Z790-BTF (shown above), and the ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Hero BTF. We haven’t seen other motherboard OEMs picking up on this GC-HPWR (HPCE) connector yet, so the buying this GPU means you’ll be locked into ASUS ecosystem in the immediate future.

If you’re confident with the cable-less future ASUS is proposing today, you get a few nice features from this card. For one, no cables means you don’t have to worry about the finicky 12VHPWR connector dealing with tight bend radius (although you’ll still be dealing the same over on the motherboard instead), plus the added benefit of a cable-free aesthetic in the front side of your case – which is why the backside connector concept is here in the first place.

So, have you decided if BTF is the way to go? One last catch: the ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER BTF White OC Edition will cost you a significant sum, at RM5,419 (prices vary slightly on the market at this writing). That’s a RM500+ premium over the standard TUF RTX 4070 Ti SUPER (non-OC variant), and over RM1,000 more if you’re comparing it against stock AIB variants like the ZOTAC card.

On top of that, you’ll need a compatible motherboard plus the case to make this card work, and none of them is going to evade the added premium that comes with first-generation products. It’s quite the investment – but if you’re willing to pay the early adopter tax, this a good GPU, all things considered.

Click here to purchase the ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER BTF White OC Edition via Shopee
Special thanks to ASUS Malaysia for providing the TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER BTF White OC Edition for this review.