NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070

[Damien Symonds]

Hey Brian, I saw you mention this graphics card, and it prompted me to ask something that I've wondered about for a while ...

What does it mean when there are other brands of the card?  For example, on this page: https://www.mwave.com.au/graphics-cards/geforce-rtx-3070

There's an ASUS one, and an MSI one, etc.

Are they all equivalent specs, or are NVIDIA ones significantly better?

[Brian]

NVIDIA is the creator of the Graphics Processor. Other companies buy these GPUs and put their own things on them, cooling strategies, etc. but the performance should be the same across the board. I found this thread:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-Nvidia-and-companies-like-MSI-Gigabyte-and-Zotac

MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS all make good stuff. ANY of those $1300 cards you linked to I would buy. It's too bad that they cost $1300, in reality they should be about $500AUD.

[Brian]

It's almost like having an Intel or AMD CPU...each motherboard manufacturer utilizes the Architecture of these chips and then design motherboards around it, with some overclocking things or doing other performance tweaks. So you will have a Intel Motherboard, Asus Motherboard, a Gigabyte Motherboard, MSI Motherboard, etc. All of them use the Intel i9 CPU chip. Some will use the AMD Ryzen CPU, etc. So in this example, NVIDIA is like Intel, and AMD is AMD. I have found that the NVIDIA drivers play really well with Photoshop and it just works with all sorts of stuff across the board. In my humble opinion, the NVIDIA RTX 3070 is the "Best Bang for your Buck" model.  If I were buying a computer today, I would be getting a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 8GB based card, and would pick the MSI one. They are built better and their customer support has been historically better.