Founders Edition and Overclocking
Let the debate of Founders Edition versus reference cards continue! Just like we saw with the GTX 1080 launch, the GeForce GTX 1070 will start its life in the form of the new NVIDIA Founders Edition, a card that is more or less equivalent to the reference designs in previous generational releases, though NVIDIA intends to sell this card and design directly and to partners for the lifetime of the generation.
Stylistically, the GTX 1070 looks identical to the GTX 1080 – same shroud, same length, same back plate, just a different number at the face of it. There are some changes though from a board design and cooler design we should note. The GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition is only a 4-phase power design, compared to the 5-phase on the GTX 1080.
The cooler is the other big change – this is a heatsink and triple heatpipe based design rather than vapor chamber. All that really means is that we expect the fan to have to spin slightly faster (and thus be slightly louder) to keep the GPU at its rated ~83C temperature at stock settings.
NVIDIA wisely kept the dual partition backplate on the GTX 1070 FE, with the back part removable should you worry about air flow into your top card in a dual-GPU configuration. The SLI connections on the 1070 support the same SLI HB (high bandwidth) bridges announced with the GTX 1080 and are also only recommended for two-card / two-GPU configurations. If you want 3- or 4-Way options, you’ll have to offer up your first child register for an Enthusiast Key.
The top GeForce GTX logo is still going to glow a soft green for you while the 8-pin power connector remains in the same spot.
Display connectivity is unchanged: a full size HDMI, three full size DisplayPort and one dual-link (DL) DVI connection.
Stock Clock Speeds and Overclocking Testing
The GeForce GTX 1070 comes with a base clock of 1506 MHz and a rated Boost clock of 1683 MHz. But how does that actually work out in extended gaming? I ran through a 10+ minute loop of Unigine’s Heaven 4.0 benchmark (very GPU heavy obviously) in order to get temperatures stabilized to see where the clock speed of the GTX 1070 landed.
These results are really positive for the GTX 1070; after starting at north of 1850 MHz with a cold GPU at the beginning of the test, we stabilized at around 1775 MHz at the end of our test run. Temperatures normalized at 79C or so, though obviously the fan sped up to keep the GPU in that range. Considering that we were promised Boost clock rate of 1683 MHz, getting ~100 MHz higher than that in a real-world workload is great news for gamers.
Quick Overclocking Testing
Using the latest version of EVGA’s Precision X software, I went through some quick manual overclocking on the GTX 1070 Founders Edition and found promising early results.
While I was able to run at a +200 MHz offset (with 112% maximum power target) for a few minutes, I settled on a +175 MHz for my stable overclocking, running for well over 30 minutes in Heaven for me without corruption or crashing. The result is a clock speed hovering around 1987 MHz, more than 450 MHz higher than the base clock the card is rated at! Obviously that is going to translate directly into gaming performance in games that are shader limited, as most tend to be.
(Note that I am NOT turning the fan speed up to 100% when doing these overclocking tests – I don’t feel that represents an action an end user would take. A sane end user at least.)
Based on my observation of
Based on my observation of the GTX 970 and 980 releases, I have a feeling that the GTX 1070 will be the best value. And anyone who buys a GTX 1080 will regret it once the 1080 Ti’s releases. Personally I may end up getting just one 1080 just to try it out for gaming and folding@home, but I’m really eager to see what Nvidia brings to the table with the Titanium release.
The link on the “Testing
The link on the “Testing Suite and Methodology Update” page in this paragraph:
“For those of you that have never read about our Frame Rating capture-based performance analysis system, the following section is for you. If you have, feel free to jump straight into the benchmark action!!”
jumps to the 1080 review.
I was properly confused for a few seconds when I didn’t see any 1070 data on the page.
@Allyn: What would you think
@Allyn: What would you think about frame time weighted frame time percentile graphs? Like in the SSD reviews?
Just a joke, I don’t think it matters that much in this data since the variance is not multiple orders of magnitude here.
Ryan and I actually had this
Ryan and I actually had this conversation the other day. It could come into play with the percentile plots, but things would need to be presented a bit differently. It would help spread cards with greater variation out of the pack a bit more, but as it stands now, cards that misbehave tend to misbehave badly enough that we don't need to weigh it any differently to make it obvious.
These new power measurements
These new power measurements are amazing, thanks pcper for keeping on it, pushing measurement methods and supplying us with sensible data.
(however, I think the particular page mixes Hawaii, Fiji and Tahiti as others have also commented on)
“Testing suite” page:
>> As a
“Testing suite” page:
>> As a result, you’ll two sets of data in our benchmark pages
Word missing?
>> As a result, you’ll word
>> As a result, you’ll word missing two sets of data in our benchmark pages.
I know it’s already alot of
I know it’s already alot of work, but can we have some openCL or blender benchmarks? or even just from preimer pro testing
not all people game
and, well, also for the 1080 please! >.<
Using Chrome atm. When I
Using Chrome atm. When I click on a picture, the pictures tend to look a bit weird. Like, with the power graph when I click on it, the picture isn’t centered on the page. When I click on the bar graph, the picture is super large.
Would anyone be able to say
Would anyone be able to say if one could pair this GPU with a 980ti since they are comparable in performance and are pretty much the same architecture?
Unlikely nVidia would let you
Unlikely nVidia would let you do it. Might work in something like Ashes of the Singularity but betting other developers will do a similar version of multi-card rendering doesn’t seem like a sound plan.
Why single out power used by
Why single out power used by graphics card alone?
As long as GPUs need driver executed by CPU it does nor make sense to me.
Great review yet again Ryan.
Great review yet again Ryan. Just a heads up, the link to the benchmarks on page 3 sends one to the 1080 page.
Are the other cards used in
Are the other cards used in the comparison overclocked?
Why does this site still use
Why does this site still use the stupid tiny lines? Why can’t you just put the damn FPS numbers down and be done with it! I hate looking at very tiny lines just to get a idea of performance! This is a huge reason why I stopped coming to this site for reviews!
Ryan.. would you agree that
Ryan.. would you agree that nVidia probably made the 970 too good of a deal for what you got? As it seems there is more differences between the 1070 vs 1080 this time around.
If nVidia could change history, they probably would have either made the 970 not as fast or more expensive.
@Ryan Shrout, can u do
@Ryan Shrout, can u do another review regarding MICRON & SAMSUNG VRAM for GTX 1070 again?
there’s some fiasco like previous GTX 970 3.5GB VRAM & guess what now is bout the brand.
obviously, every reviewers cherry picked with SAMSUNG chip & how come there’s no MICRON chip for review??? thanks.