The Zotac RTX 2070 mini graphics card is one of the smallest options currently available
while still having decent performance, so let’s find out what’s on offer and if
we’re losing anything due to the smaller size.
Let’s start by taking a look at the card. Overall it’s got a black and grey colour
scheme, so the neutral colours should help it blend in with most builds. There are two
fans on the front, a 90mm and 100mm, a nice metal back plate with Zotac logo, and a single
8 pin power connector on top.
There’s some white LED lighting on the top Zotac logo and on the front above and below
the fans in the center.
For the I/O we’ve got three DisplayPort outputs, single HDMI 2.0 and single DVI-D
outputs.
The card is on the smaller side of what’s currently available, which I think is the
main appeal for it, coming in at 21cm long, 13cm tall and 4cm thick, it’s a dual slot
card. While it is on the smaller side compared to your typical 2070, there are smaller options
out there, like MSI’s RTX 2070 Aero ITX, which is a couple of centimeters shorter if
you’re even more space restricted.
Let’s check out the specs, the boost clock is actually the same as Nvidia’s reference
spec for the 2070, which makes sense given the card is on the smaller side and probably
doesn’t have enough cooling to run it much higher, but we’ll test overclocking later.
Otherwise we’ve got 8gb of GDDR6 memory, which seems to be one of the main selling
points over the 2060 with 6gb below it.
The system that I’m testing with has an Intel i7-8700K CPU running at stock in an
MSI Z390 Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard, along with 16GB of T-Force Night Hawk CL16 memory
running at DDR4-3200 in dual channel. Check the links in the description for details on
all of the components as well as for up to date pricing. I’ve just tested a few games
at 1080p, 1440p and 4K to give you a rough idea of what to expect in terms of performance.
Battlefield 5 was tested in campaign mode rather than multiplayer mode as it’s easier
to consistently reproduce the same test run. I’ve got the RTX off results shown by the
purple bars, and the RTX on results shown by the red bars. RTX went ok at 1080p with
high settings, but I wouldn’t want to use it any higher. Meanwhile 4K with RTX off did
actually play ok, as we can see by the 1% low which isn’t too far behind the average,
though personally I’d want higher FPS in this game and stick to 1440p.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was tested with the built in benchmark, so you can compare
these results with your own as it performs the same test run. This game doesn’t really
need a high frame rate to play, so shouldn’t go too bad at 4K, though you could of course
lower settings further too.
Watch Dogs 2 also doesn’t need a high frame rate to play, and typically needs a lot of
power to run well. I can play it fine with a solid 30 FPS, so even at 4K with very high
settings it was actually pretty playable.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the built in benchmark using high settings,
so frame rates could be improved by stepping down a little, but again fairly good results
at 1440p and below.
CS:GO was tested with the Ulletical FPS benchmark, and while by no means a highly GPU demanding
game I just thought I’d show the performance of something else that’s still able to smash
high FPS even at 4K.
Overwatch is another such example, where almost 100 FPS averages were possible in the practice
range at 4K with ultra settings, not bad at all.
While it would have been great to have another 2070 to compare the smaller one against, I
don’t currently own one and didn’t have another available to test with at the same
time. Regardless, we can see that the 2070 is easily capable of 1080p and 1440p resolutions
even in higher demanding games with higher setting levels, 4K is ok in some but you’ll
probably need lower settings and a 2080 or above for a better experience there.
For overclocking I’ve retested with Far Cry 5 at high settings with the built in benchmark.
I was able to overclock the GPU core by 220MHz, and I was seeing some fair improvements in
this test. At 1080p there was a 3% improvement to average FPS, and 8% at both 1440p and 4K.
The 1% lows saw even further improvements, with a 20% boost at 1440p and 26% at 4K.
So we’re seeing some decent performance, but what are the thermals like in this smaller
card? These are the temperatures I measured with the Heaven benchmark in an ambient room
temperature of 27 degrees Celsius, on the hotter side as I did this testing a few months
ago in peak Australian summer, so they’re kind of worst case. Despite this the temperatures
aren’t that bad while under stress test. Maxing out the fan improved thermals by 9
degrees, and we can see overclocking increased them by 5, a bit more than I usually see from
overclocking which I’m guessing is due to the smaller cooling the card has.
Just for fun I’ve used my thermal camera so you can see how the backplate looks while
the stress tests are running. It was warm to the touch, but nowhere near as hot as some
of the other higher end cards I’ve tested that need oven mitts.
I’ve got the average and maximum clock speeds while running the Heaven benchmark for an
extended period, and with the 220MHz overclock and maximum power limit applied with MSI Afterburner
we're getting a nice boost. Increasing the fan speed helped a little with the overclock.
These are the average and maximum fan speeds measured under the same tests as the temperatures
and clock speeds just shown. At idle the fans are still spinning, they didn’t seem to
stop like other larger cards are able to.
I’ll also note that while testing I was not able to hear any coil whine with my unit.
Here’s what total system power draw from the wall looked like in the same Heaven benchmark,
so once manually overclocked there’s a 12% increase.
For up to date pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over
time. At the time of recording, in the US the Zotac RTX 2070 mini is going for around
$530 USD, so not really too different compared to other 2070 cards. You could of course buy
a larger one that would have better cooling and higher boost clocks out of the box, so
I think it depends more on whether or not you actually have a system that requires a
smaller graphics card while still giving you a high level of performance, the mini aspect
is the main feature here.
I’m not aware of anything higher than the 2070 that you can currently get that’s smaller.
In general I don’t personally think the 2070 is priced that well, at least compared
to the 2060 which doesn’t perform too far behind. If you do need something that’s
small yet powerful though, this is a viable option for a smaller build, though you might
also want to look into the slightly smaller MSI Aero ITX card too.
So what did you guys think of Zotac’s RTX 2070 mini graphics card? While not the smallest
2070 currently available, it’s definitely a nice option if size is a limitation in your
PC. Let me know your thoughts down in the comments, and if you’re new here get subscribed
for future tech videos like this one.