ASUS Launches GeForce RTX 4070 with GDDR6 Memory

ASUS became the first NVIDIA add-in card partner to debut a GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card with GDDR6 memory, away from its original memory type of GDDR6X. The RTX 4070 originally comes with 12 GB of 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory, yielding 504 GB/s of memory bandwidth. This ASUS card (which we hope is part of a larger refresh by NVIDIA to reduce costs of the RTX 4070), uses GDDR6 of a yet-unspecified speed. You do have 21 Gbps GDDR6 (non-X) in the market, but we imagine these to be expensive, which leaves NVIDIA with the 20 Gbps GDDR6 chip that's more readily available (which AMD uses in its RDNA 3 graphics cards), and 18 Gbps GDDR6 that the company itself uses in cards such as the RTX 4060 Ti. Any reduction in memory bandwidth would have to be compensated with increase in GPU clocks, but we don't see that happening here—the regular variant of the ASUS DUAL RTX 4070 GDDR6 EVO comes with the reference 2475 MHz maximum boost speed, while the DUAL OC variant only slightly cranks this up to 2520 MHz.