NVIDIA’s RTX 4070 is the first Lovelace part to truly be ignored by PC gamers. Despite their markups, the GeForce RTX 4090 and 4070 Ti have sold aplenty, while the RTX 4080 has generated satisfactory results too. The GeForce RTX 4070 was launched on the 4th of April in a limited volume with an MSRP of $599, $100 more than its predecessor, the RTX 3070, which debuted at $499. Currently, the RTX 4070 is yet to pick up in the DIY market.
As per insiders, the GeForce RTX 4070 was originally slated to cost $649, and it was only due to a last-moment price cut that the MSRP was set to $599. Board partners are being offered $50 rebates on their debut SKUs to make up for the confusion, and despite initial rumors of a price cut, we’re unlikely to see a change.
Reports from the supply chain in China indicate that NVIDIA was caught off guard by the RTX 4070’s poor demand. The chipmaker allegedly has no plans to offer a price reduction and will tackle the situation the old-fashioned way. Consequently, Jensen and Co will stop the supply of RTX 4070 GPUs to AICs for a month to keep the price from falling below MSRP.
According to Mydrivers, the main customers of the RTX 4070 in China are internet and PC gaming cafes, while the supply to offline channels is fairly limited. NVIDIA plans to use partially disabled AD104 (same as the RTX 4070 Ti) cores to power the RTX 4070 to improve margins. As much as 42% of the inventory will consist of scraped AD104 dies and will probably be the primary source of future 70-class Ada GPUs for the foreseeable future.
