Our market is flooded with a lot of brands for graphic cards covering the entire line, and that didn’t change when Nvidia launched their RTX GPUs last 2018. Today, we take a look at GALAX, one of the most reliable card manufacturers who offer great performance, features and justified price. We check the performance versus the retail price and see if it adds up!

Packaging and Contents

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The box of the Galax RTX 2070 EX is quite simple. It’s not plain, but it’s not overly game-y and actually has a nice classic design. This shows off it’s version of the card and not much else.

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Behind, you’ll see a list of features but not necessarily about the EX version but more on the general features of the RTX 2070 itself. Apart from that, there’s not much else to see.

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It follows a very consistent design, actually – as you can see below.

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Inside the box, there’s not much contents – just an external connector, a manual and warranty card, Plus the GPU itself.

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Design and Ports

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The GALAX RTX2070 EX features a black design with multiple cuts around the body and 2 semi-transparent 100mm fans. Measured, it is a 2.5 slot wide card and can fit in most Micro-ATX and ATX cases.

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There is a back plate at the back of the card to give strength to the PCB so that it doesn’t break or bend.

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As for ports, we get 1 HDMI port and 2 Display ports, you’ll be using all 3 of them if you want a tri-monitor set-up.

Here are other photos of the GPU itself:

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Plethora of Features

As mentioned earlier, the box of the RTX 2070 doesn’t detail so much of the EX’s features and instead the regular features of the RTX 2070 GPU but the card actually has going on. It features 2 large 100mm fans for heat dissipation, an extra backplate to add strength to the PCB to avoid sagging or bending, some RGB Effects (Because Hello 2019!) , Silent Extreme Technologies and our favourite – a 1 Click OC feature.

Check out the captions to learn more about them.

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There’s RGB lighting on both fans. It’s quite nice because it’s not obscurely bright or annoyingly colorful. You can turn it off if that’s not your cup of tea.

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1 Click OC

With the Xtreme Tuner, you can crank up the clockspeeds of the GALAX RTX2070 for better performance. Make sure to download the Xtreme Tuner here.

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Before we go on to the benchmarks, here are more photos of the GALAX RTX2070 EX ,mounted on our test bench.

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Benchmarks

We were able to run the Galax RTX2070 EX through it’s paces in 3DMark, TimeSpy and PortRoyal. It scored some of the best we’ve seen so far amongst the other RTX2070’s we’ve tested. We’ve even included some of our notebook benchmark results. This is to show just how much performance is really being squeezed out of the RTX2070 gpu.

We ran this test on an X470 Motherboard paired with an AMD Ryzen 2700X, 32GB of Ram and 480GB of Sata 3 SSD.

FIRESTRIKE

In 3DMark FireStrike, we see the scores of the GALAX RTX2070 pulling away with up to over 20% performance versus the RTX2060, and up to a huge 50% gap versus the GTX1660ti in Ultra.

This is on par with the differences in reference performances done in 1440p resolution where the RTX2070 really shines, giving you fluid 120fps and up over that detailed 2K resolution.

We’ve also compared it to a mobile version of the RTX2070 and it has a roughly 30% gap, making the desktop card a no-brainer to choose if you were deciding to buy a desktop or get a laptop.

TimeSpy

For Timespy, however, the performance gap dwindles below 20%. This benchmark is more intensive compared to firestrike, and shows the graphical capabilities of the GPU with DirectX12 enabled.

Port Royal

Lastly, in Port Royal, Ray Tracing performance is gauged and the RTX2070 has again a comfortable lead over the RTX2060 due to more tensor cores built in to the GPU itself, and not solely relying on the cuda cores.

VERDICT

Versus other brands, the GALAX RTX2070 is one of the top performers, falling second only to 2 other models in the market but the price difference gives justification to the GALX RTX2070 EX.

Retailing for roughly around the PHP35,000 mark in the Philippines, the card is one of the more affordable options, with other variants from other brands reaching all the way to PHP40,000. There are cheaper alternatives but the performance is cut-down to a level that doesn’t give justice to the RTX2070 anymore.

All in-all, it seems like GALAX really tried to provide a near-perfect balance of PRICE:PERFORMANCE ratio, giving you consistent top performance, but making sure it’s quite affordable. We definitely believe that this is one of the options to go seriously consider if you’re shopping for an RTX2070 in the market today, giving you the most out of you’re money.