Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti GPU leaked photos give us hope for our energy bills

Photographic evidence that the graphics card won’t be a power hog

(Image credit: Future)

Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti really is almost upon us, the rumor mill would have us believe, with fresh photographic evidence of the power connector setup of this graphics card, showing it won’t be a power hog.

VideoCardz (opens in new tab) leaked pictures of Gigabyte’s RTX 4070 Ti Aero OC showing the card from various angles – it’s white in color, with a triple fan cooler – and we also get a glimpse of the power adapter. In the case of the 4070 Ti, Nvidia has gone for a dual 8-pin to 16-pin adapter (more on that in a moment).

All of this, naturally, assumes these images aren’t faked, but they look genuine enough.

As per previous rumors, the RTX 4070 Ti is expected to have 7,680 CUDA Cores, with 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM (and we can see the memory configuration on the box in the pics here).

VideoCardz reckons that the 4070 Ti is a cert to be launched at Nvidia’s ‘special address’ at CES 2023 on January 3, and the graphics card should go on sale very shortly after – indeed, January 5 is the rumored on-shelf date.

Analysis: Power and pricing

With the weight of rumors now, and the appearance of photos of an actual third-party model of the RTX 4070 Ti, that CES launch is looking pretty much like a certainty (or as certain as anything from the rumor mill gets, anyway).

Whether it’ll go on sale straight away afterwards is where there seems to be a little more doubt, but again, it makes sense that it would, given that this GPU is essentially a (barely) rejigged RTX 4080 12GB. (The card that was prepped and then ‘unlaunched’ by Nvidia, as you’ll doubtless recall, meaning that everything was pretty much ready to go with this release).

As for the power adapter (needed for ATX 2.0 power supplies, which is what most PCs have) using a 2 x 8-pin configuration, that’s of course a reflection that the 4070 Ti uses less power – it’s pegged at 285W by the rumor mill – than the RTX 4080, which is 3 x 8-pin, and the RTX 4090, which is 4 x 8-pin.

Fortunately, we’ve not witnessed any cases of melting adapters with the RTX 4080. Those incidents have only been seen with the RTX 4090, but only in very uncommon cases as Nvidia has made clear (likely due to the connector not being seated properly in its port).

All that remains to know about the 4070 Ti is its price tag, which will be a crucial element, naturally. Given how AMD’s new RX 7900 XTX has made the RTX 4080 look even more overpriced than it already appeared, we’re expecting Nvidia to pitch the RTX 4070 Ti at a more reasonable level, as well as dropping the price on the 4080 to compete better with the RDNA 3 flagship.

That’s the move that makes sense to us, anyhow, particularly when you also consider that Nvidia must justify why the 4070 Ti will (presumably) be cheaper than the ditched 4080 12GB, and a 4080 16GB price drop would seem the obvious way to do so. Still, what makes sense and what happens are often two different things in the GPU world…

Darren Allan

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel – ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ – was published by Hachette UK in 2013).