The Founders Editions of the new Super series are the best Nvidia’s cards have ever looked

I hated the look of the first series of Nvidia Super cards. When it knocked out some updated Turing GPUs and created the RTX 20-series Supers, the last thing I wanted to see when checking out my new graphics card was my own face staring back at me. Mirrored surfaces are the enemy of one who looks as I do, and so the reflective surface Nvidia slapped onto the Founders Editions of its inaugural Super cards was an anathema to me.

So it was with some trepidation I opened up the box containing the Founders Edition of the RTX 4070 Super when it arrived in the office last week. What would its designers have done to the otherwise classic finish of the RTX 40-series cards? What monstrous visage would I have staring back at me, and would it be my own?

Thankfully, it was neither monstrous nor a reflection of my own face, just a classically beautiful, matte black little graphics card made to look all the more diminutive by the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 cards currently strewn about the test rig. 

Sadly, my inexpert photography is not doing this new shroud justice, but the unreflective black surround looks great, and the subtle embossed name isn’t picked out in any other colour. It’s just a black name on top of a black background, and none of that mirrored, horribly green schtick the Supers offered last time around.

Now, I’m not allowed to talk about the performance of the thing, I’m only here to do an ‘unboxing’ and show it off in images, but I did want to talk about just how pretty, in a pleasingly understated way, the new Founders Edition card is.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no issue with the grey metal aesthetic of the current Founders cards, in fact I think they were the most attractive of all of this generation of Nvidia GeForce GPUs. Third-party cards all look pretty much the same right now, no matter which manufacturer they’re coming from. A GeForce board looks a helluva lot like a Radeon card once Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI have got their hands on it

But going into full stealth mode for the new RTX 4070 Super et al really does float my boat. And if you want to put together that entire no-RGB build you’ve been craving, then the quiet black Super Founders Edition cards are the best look for the heart of your new gaming PC.

In terms of the specs, we’ve covered what the new RTX 40-series Super cards are at their core earlier on today, but suffice to say, this RTX 4070 Super’s AD104 GPU is getting a whole bunch more cores enabled. It’s going from 5,888 CUDA cores to 7,168 CUDA cores, but nothing else has changed, so you’re still getting the same 12GB GDDR6X memory, and it’s still coming in at $599.

Though the old RTX 4070 is getting a bump down to $549, though likely lower in retail; I would expect to see those cards hitting $499 pretty soon.

There’s also an RTX 4070 Ti Super, which I will continue to call the RTX 4080 LE, and which sadly won’t be getting the Founders Edition treatment. But it does come with a whole new GPU. It’s running on the same AD103 as the RTX 4080, and comes with 10% more CUDA cores, a 256-bit aggregated memory bus, and a full 16GB GDDR6X memory. It’s entirely replacing the old RTX 4070 Ti, and is coming in at the same $799 price point.

And finally, there’s the RTX 4080 Super coming at the end of the month with a rather small improvement in both CUDA core count and memory speed, which means it’s likely to offer the smallest performance bump over the previous generation of all the new Super cards. Though it is coming with an actual price cut, down from $1,200 to $999. Now, that still ain’t cheap, but it is at least a more reasonable price than the borderline offensive cost of the initial RTX 4080 card.

And the best bit, they’re all coming out this month. Well, the best bit for someone who isn’t going to be reviewing all three, anyways…