Benchmarking the RTX 4070 with our new Reign Gaming systems

As teased in our last blog post, we’ve taken the opportunity to do some RTX 4070 benchmarking of our own. In case you haven’t read it yet, check it out for an overview of what the RTX 4070 is all about - the pros and cons.

In this article we’re going to look at the actual in game performance on our own Reign Gaming systems. Fortunately, we have two such systems at hand, built with the new RTX 4070.

First up is the Reign Sentry Pro MKIV, which features an Intel Core i5-13600KF CPU, MSI RTX 4070 Ventus GPU and 16GB of Corsair DDR5 memory. This system runs Windows 11 on a WD Blue 500GB NVMe boot drive, with a WD Blue 2TB HDD for extra storage.

The second system isn’t too much different. The Reign Sentry Core MKIV has all the same specs as the Pro MKIV except for one crucial difference – we’ve swapped the Intel processor for an AMD Ryzen 5 7600 CPU.

Both Intel and AMD CPUs offer relatively the same performance (as we’ll soon see), so it’s mainly down to brand preference when deciding which PC to go for. But really, that’s the best thing about PC gaming, you get so many options!

Anyway, let’s get on with the results…

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II

The results really speak for themselves. At a resolution of 1080, both PCs easily push past 200 FPS, and even at 4K you’re going to get buttery smooth gameplay. 

We do see a slight performance increase with the Reign Sentry Core MKIV and it’s AMD processor, but a difference of 10 FPS isn’t anything to worry about when you’re already blasting past 100 FPS.

These results are maybe more a testament to how optimised the IW game engine is, or the benefits of DLSS, but these are still impressive results for a supposedly mid-range graphics card nonetheless.

Total War: Warhammer III

Now this is a great game to benchmark on. No fancy AI upscaling techniques, or GPU hungry ray tracing to butcher the FPS. Total War: Warhammer III just requires raw power, from both the CPU and GPU. It’s a good game to gauge the real-world performance of a graphics card or gaming system, and it’s why we always include it in our benchmarking.

As you can see though, the RTX 4070 holds it own when it comes to running such an intense game. Both CPUs work just as well as each other, and you’ll have some very smooth gameplay at 1080, or 1440 resolutions.

Unfortunately, 4K isn’t quite as impressive. You might be able to get away with sub 60 FPS on consoles, but you’ll definitely feel the sluggishness on PC with a mouse and keyboard.

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is probably the best indicator of how the RTX 4070 will perform for current and near future games. It has the all new DLSS 3 and some of the best ray tracing we’ve seen yet, combined with some incredible looking graphics.

Interestingly the difference between 1080 and 1440 isn’t that huge, especially when compared to the massive FPS drop at 4K. We suspect that this could be due to the performance increase of DLSS having less of an impact at lower resolutions.

Though for ultra settings with ray tracing, the RTX 4070 performs admirably at 1080 and 1440, and if you were to turn off ray tracing, or tune the graphic settings down from ultra, then 4K would be more than playable.

Far Cry 6

So this is an interesting one. The performance difference between 1080 to 4K really isn’t that big and as can be seen from the results, both Reign systems performed relatively the same – with Intel having a slight lead over AMD.

These results shouldn’t be all that surprising though as Far Cry 6 is well known to be CPU limited. This means that the RTX 4070 could potentially perform better in Reign systems with more powerful CPUs (which if you didn’t know, most of our Reign systems can be customised in this way).

But hey, over 100 FPS at 4K is more than welcome, especially for a story driven game. Unless you’re playing a competitive title, there’s not a huge benefit to getting more than 100 FPS, especially if your monitor’s refresh rate is around 120Hz or less.

Conclusion

Hopefully these benchmarks give you a good idea of what to expect from our RTX 4070 powered Reign Gaming systems. I think it’s fair to say that they can handle anything at 1080 or 1440 resolutions, but you might need something beefier to game at 4K (such as the Reign Vanguard series).

It also appears that the CPUs in our two systems are mostly matched, with Intel giving you a slight edge in one game and AMD in another. They’re also (with the exception of Far Cry 6) more than enough to handle most games.

Another thing that impressed us with the RTX 4070 in these systems was just how quiet this card was, even when running games maxed out. It’s also small, especially compared to its 40 series siblings and it’s nice to see that NVIDIA can still make a graphics card smaller than your average cat.

So in summary, if you’re looking for a gaming system that can handle max settings at 1080, or 1440, then both the Reign Sentry Pro MKIV and Reign Sentry Core MKIV should be all you need.