Two great GPUs, two great pre-Prime Day graphics card deals, one tough choice

An Acer and Gigabyte pair of graphics cards against a teal background, with a white border
(Image credit: Acer/Gigabyte)
Gigabyte RTX 4070 | 12 GB GDDR6X | 5,888 shaders | 2,565 MHz boost | $559.99 $499.99 at Newegg (save $60 with promo code FANDUA5762)

Gigabyte RTX 4070 | 12 GB GDDR6X | 5,888 shaders | 2,565 MHz boost | $559.99 $499.99 at Newegg (save $60 with promo code FANDUA5762)
The RTX 4070 is a popular card and can be difficult to find at a discount, but it's important to remember that this price is cheaper than it was at launch. You're getting nearly RTX 3080 performance but with all those nice RTX 40-series features. This Gigabyte model uses the traditional 8-pin PCIe power connector, rather than the new 12VHPWR one, which makes it far easier to install as an upgrade.

RTX 4070 price check:  Best Buy $554.99 | Walmart $534.99 | Amazon $529.99

Acer Nitro RX 7900 GRE | 16 GB GDDR6 | 5,120 shaders | 2,395 MHz boost | $539.99 $509.99 at Newegg (save $30 with promo code FANDUA5753)

Acer Nitro RX 7900 GRE | 16 GB GDDR6 | 5,120 shaders | 2,395 MHz boost | $539.99 $509.99 at Newegg (save $30 with promo code FANDUA5753)
The RX 7900 XT is one of the more recent releases out of AMD, at least in the global market. It started out as a special edition for the Chinese gaming market, but it was rolled out globally to help the red team compete with the green guys. It's a good deal, too, being big chunks of the RX 7900 XT but with a bit less of everything.

Price check: Amazon $529.99 | Best Buy $529.99

Just $10 separates these two great graphics cards, so which one is worth splashing out $500 on? Well, the good news is that no matter which one you go with, you're getting the latest generation of GPU from AMD and Nvidia, both packed with all the features you expect in a modern graphics card.

The cheaper of the two is Gigabyte's take on Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070. It has higher clocks than the reference design (2,565 vs 2,475 MHz) but a 4% overclock is barely going to be noticeable in games. It sports a pretty large heatsink and cooler, so you'll need to make sure you've got plenty of room inside your PC case for it.

Rather than using the 12VHPWR power connector that many RTX 40-series cards sport, Gigabyte has fitted a standard 8-pin PCIe connector, which means you won't need to use adapter cables if you're upgrading from an older GPU. Ada Lovelace chips are also very power efficient, so you won't need to buy a new power supply unit unless it's a very old and basic one.

With excellent ray tracing capabilities, plus full support for every DLSS 3.5 feature (AI-powered upscaling, frame generation, and ray tracing denoising), it'll power through any game you care to throw at it. The RTX 4070 can handle 1080p and 1440p gaming with ease and, depending on what settings you use, it'll manage 4K too.

Acer's Radeon RX 7900 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition) is a graphics card that uses the same GPU as in the mighty Radeon RX 7900 XTX, though lots of shaders have been disabled, along with a few memory-cache chiplets. It's still a very potent graphics card, though, and is generally faster than the RTX 4070 in most games.

When ray tracing is involved, however, the performance lead swings back in favor of Nvidia's mid-range model and despite AMD's work on improving its shader-based FSR 3.1 upscaling and frame generation algorithms, they're not quite as good as Nvidia's DLSS. In some games, you can barely tell the difference but in others, FSR offers plenty of performance gains but at a cost of visual fidelity.

AMD's RDNA 3 processors aren't quite as energy efficient as RTX 40-series ones either, and the RX 7900 GRE will consume up to 60 W more than the RTX 4070. Offsetting this a little is the fact that Acer's Nitro model boasts a 7% overclock, compared to the reference design.

At launch, the RTX 4070 had an MSRP of $599 but now that it's been superseded by the RTX 4070 Super (pun not intended), prices have come down and we're now at the stage where we get this kind of deal. The RX 7900 GRE hasn't been replaced by anything just yet but it's still great to see a healthy chunk being sliced off the price tag.

Yes, $500 is a lot of money to spend on 'just' a graphics card but these are both very capable pixel pushers. If you've not upgraded your GPU for a few years, you're going to be shocked by just how powerful they are.

Nick Evanson
Hardware Writer

Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in 1981, with the love affair starting on a Sinclair ZX81 in kit form and a book on ZX Basic. He ended up becoming a physics and IT teacher, but by the late 1990s decided it was time to cut his teeth writing for a long defunct UK tech site. He went on to do the same at Madonion, helping to write the help files for 3DMark and PCMark. After a short stint working at Beyond3D.com, Nick joined Futuremark (MadOnion rebranded) full-time, as editor-in-chief for its gaming and hardware section, YouGamers. After the site shutdown, he became an engineering and computing lecturer for many years, but missed the writing bug. Cue four years at TechSpot.com and over 100 long articles on anything and everything. He freely admits to being far too obsessed with GPUs and open world grindy RPGs, but who isn't these days? 

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