Not All RTX 5070s Are the Same: AIBs Explained

We're going to use the Nvidia RTX 5070 as our example here. But the concepts remain the same regardless of GPU. This is the case for AMD and Intel GPUs, too.

So, you're building a gaming PC and you need to decide which GPU you're going for. Someone on the internet mentions that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 is a good option, so you go to Scan, or Newegg, or Micro Center, or Amazon, you type in "5070" and somehow there is more than one 5070?

You scroll a little bit. You see an ASUS 5070, and one from MSI, another from Gigabyte. That's weird, isn't it? Everyone knows that Nvidia makes the 5070. So how come suddenly Gigabyte, MSI, ASUS, and a bunch of other brands make the 5070?

More importantly, if they're all 5070s, why do their prices vary so much? Is a 5070 from x brand better than a 5070 from y brand?

Well, the answer lies in an interesting quirk of the graphics card industry. Let's break it down.

When you use the term GPU, you're probably referring to the physical graphics card that you install into a PC. However, if we're being technical about it, the GPU is the actual chip that the graphics card is built around.

Continuing to use the 5070 as an example, Nvidia makes those chips, but (aside from so-called "FE" cards), it does not make the physical graphics cards. Instead, Nvidia sells the chips (the literal GPUs) to other companies, and those companies build the graphics cards.

Those other companies, like ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, etc., are known as "Add-in Board Manufacturers". And once they buy the chips, they are essentially free to build the rest of the graphics card as they want.

This is the reason why, when you google "5070", there are many options and they all look different, and their prices are all over the place.

Okay, so that makes sense, but if every 5070 uses the same core chip, does that mean that all graphics cards from all manufacturers perform identically?

Technically no, realistically yes.

Nvidia provides the same core GPU to all the different AIBs. So for the most part, the different 5070s these AIBs create are very similar in terms of raw performance. If you've heard of specs like TFLOPs, Tensor Cores, VRAM, and CUDA Cores, these will generally remain identical no matter which 5070 you end up buying.

What won't be the same, however, is the cooler. Almost the entirety of the graphics card you buy is the cooler. The GPU itself is just a single chip on a circuit board, and the primary way the AIBs differentiate themselves and compete for your money is by designing their own coolers.

This is where the difference between x 5070 and y 5070 starts to become apparent. Some coolers have two fans, some have three. Some coolers are three slots thick, some are four. Some have a tonne of controllable RGB lighting. Some might be a total eyesore to you, while others may fit the style of your build better.

All this is to say, you're going to get 5070 performance no matter what 5070 you buy, but one 5070 might be quieter, another might stay cooler, and another might be completely out of the question because you're building a super compact PC and it just will not accept a 4-slot graphics card.

However, some AIBs provide 5070s that do technically perform better than others.

Another way an AIB can compete for your money is by applying a factory overclock to the 5070. Unlike the DIY overclocking you might be thinking of, this overclock is applied a the factory and validated by the manufacturer. The magnitude and the specifics of this overclock will vary from AIB to AIB.

If the 5070 has a factory overclock, then yes, technically, it will perform better than the base-level 5070. But the improvement will be very small. If you're just a PC gamer who cares only about playing games, the overclock will be imperceptible to you, so don't worry about it.

Some AIBs will carry multiple variants of a single GPU model, typically arranged in a "good, better, best" stack. Here's what you can usually expect from these tiers.