#RealTimeRay-tracing

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ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 2070 MINI Review

The Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 2070 Mini is in contrast to other RTX 2070 cards on the market. By, in contrast, I'm talking about the physical size of the card. The Mini moniker at the end of the product name denotes a smaller, more compact version. Over the last few generations of Nvidia cards, Zotac has produced the Mini models. I got my first peek at a Zotac GeForce GTX 1080TI Mini a few years ago at CES and then went hands-on with their mini version of the GTX 1080 here a while back. The Zotac mini cards are designed to fit into most systems produced or built today. With a smaller footprint, they make for some small and powerful systems. But, does the smaller size of the Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 2070 Mini hinder the card?     Specifications of the Zotac GeForce RTX 2070 Mini GPU GeForce RTX 2070 CUDA cores 2304 Video Memory 8GB GDDR6 Memory Bus 256-bit Engine Clock Boost: 1620 MHz Memory Clock 14.0 Gbps PCI Express 3.0 Display Outputs 3 x DisplayPort (4096x2160@60Hz) HDMI 2.0 (3840x2160@60Hz) DVI-D HDCP Support Yes Multi-Display Capability Quad Display Recommended Power Supply 550W Power Consumption 175W Power Input 8-pin DirectX 12 API feature level 12_1 OpenGL 4.5 Cooling 90mm fan, 100mm fan Slot Size Dual Slot SLI No Supported OS Windows 10 / 7 x64 Card Length 211mm x 129mm x 41mm (8.3in x 5.08in x 1.61in) Accessories User Manual   Packaging Zotac doesn't deviate too far from their established box art with the RTX 2070 mini. On the front of the box, there is geometric graphics along with the product name. Flipping the box over and taking a look at the backside will give you a lot more information on the GPU housed inside as the back side of the box.   Once you open up the box, you'll find the GPU wrapped in an anti-static bag and sitting in a closed cell insert.

  The Zotac GeForce RTX 2070 mini is, well, just that: mini. It's small size measures in at 211mm (8.3 in) long, 129mm (5.08 in)wide, and 41mm (1.61 in) tall. Even at this smaller size, Zotac was able to fit a 90mm and a 100mm fan to help keep the card cool. On the back, the backplate actually wraps around the back edge of the card. During testing, the back plate did get a bit warm and aids in the cooling of the components. There are two different size fans on the Zotac RTX 2070 Mini and each size fan has unique fan blades, the front fan which is 90mm has fan blades that have a sharper angle to them. This allows the fan to have a higher static pressure. This fan is positioned over key components. The 100mm fan has flatter blades. This is done to maximize the airflow over the area and move as much air as possible. Under the fan shroud, you can get a peek at a couple of the 6mm heat pipes that run through the heatsink. All total there are five heat pipes. The fans, heatsink, and the backplate are all part of Zotac's IceStorm 2.0 cooling solution.

On the case side of the card, a LED-lit Zotac Gaming logo is present in the center. When in use, this logo lights up in white and cannot be changed. You can also see the edges of the backplate are bend and shaped to meet up with the fan shroud. A single 8-pin PCIe power connector is required to power the GPU.

At the rear of the card, the back plate again wraps around the PCB and meets the edge of the fan shroud. This is designed to add functionality in the form of protection for the fins on the heatsink and hide the heatsink.  Because of the back plate, there are no exposed heatsink fins on the Zotac RTX 2070 mini.

While the card is small in terms of length and width, the Zotac RTX 2070 mini is still a double slot card. The I/O is a bit different than other RTX cards we've reviewed. Most do not include a DVI port which Zotac does have. The Zotac RTX 2070 also lacks the VirtualLink connector. The GPU's I/O includes 1x DVI, 1x HDMI, and 3x DisplayPort connectors.

  Included with the Zotac GeForce RTX 2070 mini is Zotac's overclocking and monitoring software called FireStorm.  The software is pretty simple and all the controls are laid out well. Starting at the left side, you'll see three labels, Auto, Manual, and Advanced. These are used to adjust the fan speeds. Under that, you'll see the OC Scanner. To the right, you'll see the adjustments for GPU clock speed, memory clock speeds, power and temperature targets, etc. At the bottom, once you've found the settings you like, you can choose to save it as one of three profiles.

  The latest versions of manufactures overclocking software feature what's called OC Scanner. The software attempts to find a decent overclock. The scanning takes a bit of time however, it doesn't always work. For this card, it actually failed at every attempt but, that's not really surprising considering that OC Scanner fails on most cards I've tested. Auto overclocking, at least in my experience has never worked well. I prefer to tweak individual settings myself.

Clicking the advanced button on the right side brings up a custom fan curve graph. You can set the fan speeds at a given temperature.

The gear icon is the application settings as well as a monitor page. You can set up things like autostart with Windows, automatically apply settings at startup, and minimize the application on startup. You will also find help and info pages. The information page gives you specific information on the graphics card currently installed. At stock settings, the Zotac Geforce RTX 2070 mini performed well. The GPU peaked at 1785 MHz with a max temp of 66°c and the fans spinning at 58% of max, this was after 1/2 hour of letting a benchmark loop. At these settings, the card was a bit louder as far as fan noise than the other full-size cards I tested. However, given the small size of the card and the smaller size of the heatsink/fans, this was not unexpected. What was unexpected was the noise level. It was less than I expected. I could hear it on the open bench. It was noticeable but not annoyingly so.

  The maximum stable overclock I was able to get on this GPU was 2010Mhz on the GPU core, 8112 Mhz on the memory. A slight bump in temperature at the 1/2 hour mark from 66° c (stock) to 71°c was recorded. The fans also spun up a bit faster at 62% of max. Again, the results were recorded after a 1/2 hour benchmark run.

  Test System and Synthetic Benchmarks Component Product Name Provided By Processor Intel Core i7-8700K (Retail) Intel Motherboard Gigabyte GA-Z370-Gaming 7 Gigabyte Memory G.Skill SniperX 2x8GB @ 3400MHz 16-16-16-36 (XMP) G.Skill Drive Samsung 240 EVO 256GB SSD, Crucial MX500 1 TB SATA III SSD Samsung/Crucial Video Card Zotac Geforce RTX 2070 Mini, Nvidia RTX 2080 Founders Edition, Zotac Geforce GTX 1080 mini, EVGA Geforce GTX 1070 TI Zotac/Nvidia/EVGA Monitor BenQ EL2870U 28 inch 4K HDR Gaming Monitor 3840×2160 @ 60 Hz Case DimasTech EasyXL DimasTech Power Supply Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 1500W Cooler Master Operating System Windows 10 x64 Pro with latest patches and updates I want to thank Zotac and EVGA for providing their respective GPUs as comparison cards for this review.   Testing Methodology: There are many ways to benchmark GPUs. With these benchmarks our goal is to do two things: first to show the performance of the card and secondly to make them easy to replicate. With a similarly configured system, you should be able to get similar results to compare your current graphics card against. There will always be a variance from system to system. All games for this review are tested with the HIGHEST IN GAME  PRESET unless otherwise specified. No changes were made to the operating system.     Synthetic Tests 3DMark Firestrike from Futuremark is a Semi-synthetic DirectX11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. Firestrike performs advanced geometry, illumination and particle tests with its Graphics benchmark and performs physics simulations using the CPU. Firestrike Ultra Kicks it up a notch and ratchets up the resolution to 4K and turns the quality up a bit.

Timespy is an additional test in 3DMark which represents DirectX 12 gameplay. The extreme version is meant to test the highest end graphics cards at 4K.

Unigine’s Superposition features both a monitor benchmark but also a VR load as well. I used the 4K optimized and 8K optimized presets. Superposition also allows you to explore the environment in VR Mode with your headset connected. Gaming Benchmarks Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an action-adventure video game developed by Eidos Montréal in conjunction with Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix. It continues the narrative from the 2013 game Tomb Raider and its sequel Rise of the Tomb Raider. Witcher 3 closes the chapter on Geralt’s life. The game features a massive open world that the player can explore. Witcher 3 uses REDEngine developed independently by CD Projekt RED. The game engine features stunning visuals. Middle Earth: Shadow of War is an action RPG game based on the novels of J. R. R. Tolkien. It’s the sequel to Monolith’s successful Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor game and the events of the game take place after The Hobbit but before the Lord of the Rings. The game builds upon the nemesis system that made the first game such a surprise hit, and it’s just brutal to PC hardware. Far Cry 5 is an action-adventure first-person shooter video game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Toronto and published by Ubisoft for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It is the successor to the 2014 video game Far Cry 4, and the fifth main installment in the Far Cry series. The game was released on March 27, 2018   Gaming Benchmarks Continued Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands is a tactical shooter game set in an open world environment and played from a third-person perspective with an optional first-person view for gun aiming. Players play as members of the Delta Company, First Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group, also known as “Ghosts”, a fictional elite special operations unit of the United States Army under the Joint Special Operations Command. The game can be played as a single player experience or you can invite up to 3 of your friends to fill out your squad. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is an action role-playing game with first-person shooter and stealth mechanics. Players take the role of Adam Jensen, a man equipped with mechanical cybernetic implants called augmentations. Battlefield V is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA DICE and published by Electronic Arts. Battlefield V is the sixteenth installment in the Battlefield series. Battlefield V features a limited single-player campaign in the form of War Stories, the rest of the missions and adventures are online multiplayer.  For this specific test, I did not have DXR turned on. Raytracing & DLSS Testing At launch, the 20 series GPUs boasted the ability to do real-time raytracing and use a new feature called DLSS or Deep Learning Super Sampling, however, at that time there were no games out that supported either of those features. Without being able to test those features, I think the 20 series got off to a rocky start. Fast forward to Novemberish 2018; Windows 10 1803 update was finally released that enabled the ray tracing libraries in DX12. With that, Nvidia released a new set of drivers and EA/Dice released the 1st patch for BattleField V however, the patch wasn’t without issues and performance was at least halved as compared to non-DXR tests. EA/Dice have now released a new patch that performs quite a bit better. However, there is still a performance penalty for enabling DXR in Battlefield V. For the DXR testing in Battlefield V, I chose to use 1080p as the resolution and the base graphics settings to Ultra. DXR was set to Low, Medium, and Ultra. I also included the results with DXR off as well.

The different levels of ray tracing start to change the level of detail in the reflections.  I didn’t see much difference on the RTX 2080 Duke between ultra and high and again between low and medium during the benchmark run. The mirror in the image below shows a clear reflection at all levels of DXR, however, the details reflecting in the puddles change quite a bit.

DXR Low

DXR Medium

DXR High

DXR Ultra   Note: Recently Battlefield V and Metro Exodus were released with both DLSS and RTX features available. Another article is coming with our thoughts on DLSS and RTX. The only game to support DLSS at the time of this review is Final Fantasy XV. DLSS leverages Nvidia’s Tensor cores on the RTX 20 series cards. It works by basically rendering at a lower target resolution then, sends the frame to the Tensor Cores and the Deep Learning network to get upscaled and the “AI” fills in the information for the anti-aliasing. DLSS is only available in 4K. For this test, I chose to run the beginning missions around Hammerhead and occasionally heading back to the gas station.

During gameplay, I didn’t notice too much of a difference. There were some softer parts to the image once DLSS was enabled. As I continue to go through the game, more images will be captured. The Ultra preset settings were used, however, in order to enable or disable DLSS you have to use the custom option.

Final Fantaxy XV DLSS Disabled

Final Fantasy XV DLSS Enabled To start, no, I did no test DLSS/RTX in Metro or BFV. During the benchmark session, the DLSS patch for BFV had not been released yet. We are currently working on benchmarking both games with RTX and DLSS as well as image quality. The xx70 series is where I get excited. Why? Well, that's because it's where I live. My last 3 personal builds have all been the xx70 series. I play at 1080p and have branched out to 1440. The RTX 2070 does really well at both 1080p and 1440 and reaches above 60 FPS in both resolutions. While my BenQ monitor isn't on the list of G-Sync Compatible monitors, it is A-Sync compatible and doesn't exhibit any issues while gaming on it. At both 1080p and 1440 with G-Sync enabled, gameplay is extremely smooth. With RTX enabled on medium in Battlefield V gameplay was great at 1080p and decent at 1440.

While the Zotac GeForce RTX 2070 mini is small in size, it is large in performance. This is the first RTX 2070 that I've had a chance to get my hands on and it did not disappoint. As expected, it outperformed the older GTX 1080 and 1070TI by a fairly decent margin. As time moves forward so does technology, I expect to see the RTX 2070 to continue to pull away from the GTX 1080. While the performance of the Zotac RTX 2070 mini is good, it doesn't tell the whole story. The mini-series of cards from Zotac is designed to fit into many cases. A small ITX build is very possible with the mini cards and while they are small, their performance in both games and cooling is acceptable. The GPU in its stock form hit a max of 66°c during my testing. Granted the fans spun up a bit higher than other full-size cards. The RTX 2080 FE during the same test had the fans spinning around 45-48% where the Zotac RTX 2070 mini was spinning at 58% or 1680 RPM as reported by GPU-Z. Now there are two versions of Zotac's GeForce RTX 2070 mini, the OC and Non-OC. Our review sample is the Non-OC version. Overclocking the GPU resulted in a GPU speed of 2010 MHz with memory clocking in at 8112 MHz. This resulted in a temperature of 71° with fan speeds of 62% or 1800 RPM as reported by GPU-Z. Currently, the Zotac GeForce RTX 2070 mini (non-OC) retails for $529.99. The RTX series still demand a premium over the last gen cards however, the jump is a bit easier to manage. I really like the mini-series of cards from Zotac. In the past, I've used their GTX 1080 mini and was impressed then. The RTX 2070 mini is equally impressive from both a performance and cooling standpoint. If you want a small form factor gaming rig that performs well at both 1080p and 1440, the RTX 2070 mini may fill the void.         amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "dewaynecarel-20"; amzn_assoc_ad_mode = "manual"; amzn_assoc_ad_type = "smart"; amzn_assoc_marketplace = "amazon"; amzn_assoc_region = "US"; amzn_assoc_design = "enhanced_links"; amzn_assoc_asins = "B07M8DY3QY"; amzn_assoc_placement = "adunit"; amzn_assoc_linkid = "06bde0fa29d2ad2fa5b01960f3177fce"; Read the full article