Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Aero review: A beautiful choice for white PC builds

Looking to build an all-white PC? Then you’re very likely to be looking for a graphics cards that fits that colour theme. If you’re looking for an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti GPU, then the Gigabyte RTX 5070 Ti Aero OC 16GB might just do the job.

In shape and form, the 5070 Ti Aero card looks uncannily like the faster Aorus GeForce RTX 5080 Master (read our review) but there are some noticeable differences in its chassis. While it comes with the same “Hawk” fans, which features a unique blade design that Gigabyte says is inspired by the aerodynamics of an eagles’ wing, the three fans do not come with the triple-ring RGB Halo lights that are only available in Gigabyte’s Aorus line of cards. It also lacks the LCD Edge screen, although it must be said that if you are looking for the added bells and whistles that comes with an Aorus Master graphics card, Gigabyte do have that with an RTX 5070 TI GPU too. But otherwise, the 5070 Ti Aero

Elsewhere though, Gigabyte has stuck with using composite metal grease for the GPU while opting for server-grade thermal conductive gel, instead of traditional thermal pads, for cooling the VRAM and MOSFETs components. Together with the Hawk fans, these form the tripartite of Gigabyte’s new Windforce cooling system. While the 5070 Ti Aero isn’t lacking in RGB per se, it is very subtle with it – with just “Aero” logo having 16.7 million customisable colour options and lighting effects.

All in all, I quite like the Gigabyte RTX 5070 Ti Aero’s white aesthetics. It’s very clean and there’s something very attractive about a card that doesn’t go overboard with RGB lighting. But how does the card fare when it comes to performance? Let’s find out.

Gaming performance

To benchmark the RTX 5070 Ti Aero card, I used the same list of games used to test the MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X (read our review). I’ve also switched the card BIOS to “Performance” mode, ensuring the card’s fastest settings are used.

• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
• ROG Maximus Z890 Hero
• Samsung 990 Pro 1TB SSD
• Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5
• Windows 11 Home 64-bit
• ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG32UCDM 4K Gaming Monitor

For our benchmarks, we want to focus on the 1080p and 1440p performance numbers. But as our NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti review showed, the 5070 Ti can run 4K pretty well too – at least at an acceptable framerate. I’m also only benchmarking the raw power of the Gigabyte RTX 5070 Ti Aero card without DLSS switched on – since we already know the benefits with DLSS turned on, and any differences in framerates for supported games between the same class of GPU cards is going to be extremely negligible. That said, I will placing a heavy emphasis on factors like power draw and thermal performance.

That the Gigabyte RTX 5070 Ti Aero card consistently beat our NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti's reference card from MSI in our gaming benchmarks is not a surprise. In fact, you could even say it had to, considering it has a slightly higher boosted clock speed. Interestingly, I'd thought that the performance differences between both cards would be marginal at worse, but games like Total War: Warhammer III and Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy saw a spike in 1080p and 1440p performances in favour of the Gigabyte's card.

It's not just gaming performance that the RTX 5070 Ti's excels in when compared to our reference card, but it also runs pretty cool even with a supercharged GPU – an impressive 7-degree Celsius cooler. Gigabyte's new Windforce cooling solution is pretty impressive, and I think there’s a lot of potential headroom if you are intending to do some serious overclocking with this card.

Final thoughts

With an SRP of S$1,699, the Gigabyte RTX 5070 Ti Aero is not exactly cheap when compared to the MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Ventus 3X reference card (S$1,422). In fact, retailers are already blowing up the recommended pricing set by Gigabyte, and I've seen the card going for between S$1,748-$1,759 at this time of publishing. Admittedly, it's not a huge mark-up compared to the RTX 5080 and 5090 GPUs and it will be interesting to see how these prices will hold once AMD launches their highly-anticipated Radeon 9000 series GPUs next month.

But price aside, I thought the RTX 5070 Ti Aero's white aesthetics, subtle RGB lighting and build quality make it one of the more elegant and premium-looking RTX 5070 Ti cards available today. Its overall gaming and thermal performances are equally impressive too. It's still premature to say if this is the RTX 5070 Ti card to get as we have yet to test cards from the other major card brands like ASUS and MSI. But white-coloured cards are not very common, and if you're looking for a white RTX 5070 Ti graphics card to complement your white PC build, then the Gigabyte RTX 5070 Ti Aero should very easily be one of your shopping options.

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