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Power, Thermals and Noise
For our thermal testing, we ran Gaming loads rather than a power virus type of load as this represents a far more realistic loading scenario for those looking to see what you can expect when gaming on your new RTX card.
With the custom cooler on the Zotac RTX 2070 Mini we were greeted by slightly lower temps than the Founders Edition 2070. This could also be due to the lower board power of the GPU. When fully loaded the GPU did not surpass 70C stopping just shy at 69 and fluctuating between 68 and 69C consistently.
Thermals while at max overclock only went up 3 degrees reaching 72C.
The fan noise for the Zotac RTX 2070 Mini was not even audible compared to standard casefans running in close proximity. This was a surprise as even under overclock the card never went over 46% fan and held the temps just fine. This is a great thing as a Mini card is very likely to be put into a very flow restricted ITX box. This simply means this cooler should have some headroom to deal with waste heat.
It seems that the Zotac LAGS the reference card in every single chart?
Yes, it does at stock speeds. This is because as explained in the review the “reference” or “Founders Edition” is a pre-overclocked card whereas this GPU uses a non A-die GPU which Nvidia spec’s as not designed for out of teh box overclocked card models. As you can see from my overclock testing it overclocks just fine so, im not really sure what the non A designator reasoning is or if its lower yield and possibly may have some that do not overclock as well.
This allows Zotac to price the card competitively while still being able to overclock to meet and even exceed the overclock of the FE model.
I hope this helps clear things up.
Thanks for this review. I have a 280X Corsair case and I was looking for a 2070 card that wouldn’t take over my build. I have a Strix 570 card now and the dimensions are almost identicle between these 2 cards. This looks like the perfect option for performance and size.