The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 & GTX 1070 Founders Editions Review: Kicking Off the FinFET Generation
by Ryan Smith on July 20, 2016 8:45 AM ESTOverclocking
For our final evaluation of the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 Founders Edition cards, let’s take a look a overclocking.
Whenever I review an NVIDIA reference card, I feel it’s important to point out that while NVIDIA supports overclocking – why else would they include fine-grained controls like GPU Boost 3.0 – they have taken a hard stance against true overvolting. Overvolting is limited to NVIDIA’s built in overvoltage function, which isn’t so much a voltage control as it is the ability to unlock 1-2 more boost bins and their associated voltages. Meanwhile TDP controls are limited to whatever value NVIDIA believes is safe for that model card, which can vary depending on its GPU and its power delivery design.
For GTX 1080FE and its 5+1 power design, we have a 120% TDP limit, which translates to an absolute maximum TDP of 216W. As for GTX 1070FE and its 4+1 design, this is reduced to a 112% TDP limit, or 168W. Both cards can be “overvolted” to 1.093v, which represents 1 boost bin. As such the maximum clockspeed with NVIDIA’s stock programming is 1911MHz.
| GeForce GTX 1080FE Overclocking | ||||
| Stock | Overclocked | |||
| Core Clock | 1607MHz | 1807MHz | ||
| Boost Clock | 1734MHz | 1934MHz | ||
| Max Boost Clock | 1898MHz | 2088MHz | ||
| Memory Clock | 10Gbps | 11Gbps | ||
| Max Voltage | 1.062v | 1.093v | ||
| GeForce GTX 1070FE Overclocking | ||||
| Stock | Overclocked | |||
| Core Clock | 1506MHz | 1681MHz | ||
| Boost Clock | 1683MHz | 1858MHz | ||
| Max Boost Clock | 1898MHz | 2062MHz | ||
| Memory Clock | 8Gbps | 8.8Gbps | ||
| Max Voltage | 1.062v | 1.093v | ||
Both cards ended up overclocking by similar amounts. We were able to take the GTX 1080FE another 200MHz (+12% boost) on the GPU, and another 1Gbps (+10%) on the memory clock. The GTX 1070 could be pushed another 175MHz (+10% boost) on the GPU, while memory could go another 800Mbps (+10%) to 8.8Gbps.
Both of these are respectable overclocks, but compared to Maxwell 2 where our reference cards could do 20-25%, these aren’t nearly as extreme. Given NVIDIA’s comments on the 16nm FinFET voltage/frequency curve being steeper than 28nm, this could be first-hand evidence of that. It also indicates that NVIDIA has pushed GP104 closer to its limit, though that could easily be a consequence of the curve.
Given that this is our first look at Pascal, before diving into overall performance, let’s first take a look at an overclocking breakdown. NVIDIA offers 4 knobs to adjust when overclocking: overvolting (unlocking additional boost bins), increasing the power/temperature limits, the memory clock, and the GPU clock. Though all 4 will be adjusted for a final overclock, it’s often helpful to see whether it’s GPU overclocking or memory overclocking that delivers the greater impact, especially as it can highlight where the performance bottlenecks are on a card.
To examine this, we’ve gone ahead and benchmarked the GTX 1080 4 times: once with overvolting and increased power/temp limits (to serve as a baseline), once with the memory overclocked added, once with GPU overclock added, and finally with both the GPU and memory overclocks added.
| GeForce GTX 1080 Overclocking Performance | ||||||
| Power/Temp Limit (+20%) | Core (+12%) | Memory (+10%) | Cumulative | |||
| Tomb Raider |
+3%
|
+4%
|
+1%
|
+10%
|
||
| Ashes |
+1%
|
+9%
|
+1%
|
+10%
|
||
| Crysis 3 |
+4%
|
+4%
|
+2%
|
+11%
|
||
| The Witcher 3 |
+2%
|
+6%
|
+3%
|
+10%
|
||
| Grand Theft Auto V |
+1%
|
+4%
|
+2%
|
+8%
|
||
Across all 5 games, the results are clear and consistent: GPU overclocking contributes more to performance than memory overclocking. To be sure, both contribute, but even after compensating for the fact that the GPU overclock was a bit greater than the memory overclock (12% vs 10%), we still end up with the GPU more clearly contributing. Though I am a bit surprised that increasing the power/temperature limit didn't have more of an effect.
Overall we’re looking at an 8%-10% increase in performance from overclocking. It’s enough to further stretch the GTX 1080FE and GTX 1070FE’s leads, but it won’t radically alter performance.
Finally, let’s see the cost of overclocking in terms of power, temperature, and noise. For the GTX 1080FE, the power cost at the wall proves to be rather significant. An 11% Crysis 3 performance increase translates into a 60W increase in power consumption at the wall, essentially moving GTX 1080FE into the neighborhood of NVIDIA’s 250W cards like the GTX 980 Ti. The noise cost is also not insignificant, as GTX 1080FE has to ramp up to 52.2dB(A), a 4.6dB(A) increase in noise. Meanwhile FurMark essentially confirms these findings, with a smaller power increase but a similar increase in noise.
As for the GTX 1070FE, neither the increase in power consumption nor noise is quite as high as GTX 1080FE, though the performance uplift is also a bit smaller. The power penalty is just 21W at the wall for Crysis 3 and 38W for FurMark. This translates to a 2-3dB(A) increase in noise, topping out at 50.0dB for FurMark.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
200 Comments
View All Comments
Ranger1065 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Your unwavering support for Anandtech is impressive.I too have a job that keeps me busy, yet oddly enough I find the time to browse (I prefer that word to "trawl") a number of sites.
I find it helps to form objective opinions.
I don't believe in early adoption, but I do believe in getting the job done on time, however if you are comfortable with a 2 month delay, so be it :)
Interesting to note that architectural deep dives concern your art and media departments so closely in their purchasing decisions. Who would have guessed?
It's true (God knows it's been stated here often enough) that
Anandtech goes into detail like no other, I don't dispute that.
But is it worth the wait? A significant number seem to think not.
Allow me to leave one last issue for you to ponder (assuming you have the time in your extremely busy schedule).
Is it good for Anandtech?
catavalon21 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Impatient as I was at the first for benchmarks, yes, I'm a numbers junkie, since it's evident precious few of us will have had a chance to buy one of these cards yet (or the 480), I doubt the delay has caused anyone to buy the wrong card. Can't speak for the smart phone review folks are complaining about being absent, but as it turns out, what I'm initially looking for is usually done early on in Bench. The rest of this, yeah, it can wait.mkaibear - Saturday, July 23, 2016 - link
Job, house, kids, church... more than enough to keep me sufficiently busy that I don't have the time to browse more than a few sites. I pick them quite carefully.Given the lifespan of a typical system is >5 years I think that a 2 month delay is perfectly reasonable. It can often take that long to get purchasing signoff once I've decided what they need to purchase anyway (one of the many reasons that architectural deep dives are useful - so I can explain why the purchase is worthwhile). Do you actually spend someone else's money at any point or are you just having to justify it to yourself?
Whether or not it's worth the wait to you is one thing - but it's clearly worth the wait to both Anandtech and to Purch.
razvan.uruc@gmail.com - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Excellent article, well deserved the wait!giggs - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
While this is a very thorough and well written review, it makes me wonder about sponsored content and product placement.The PG279Q is the only monitor mentionned, making sure the brand appears, and nothing about competing products. It felt unnecessary.
I hope it's just a coincidence, but considering there has been quite a lot of coverage about Asus in the last few months, I'm starting to doubt some of the stuff I read here.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
"The PG279Q is the only monitor mentionned, making sure the brand appears, and nothing about competing products."There's no product placement or the like (and if there was, it would be disclosed). I just wanted to name a popular 1440p G-Sync monitor to give some real-world connection to the results. We've had cards for a bit that can drive 1440p monitors at around 60fps, but GTX 1080 is really the first card that is going to make good use of higher refresh rate monitors.
giggs - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Fair enough, thank you for responding promptly. Keep up the good work!arh2o - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
This is really the gold standard of reviews. More in-depth than any site on the internet. Great job Ryan, keep up the good work.Ranger1065 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
This is a quality article.timchen - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Great article. It is pleasant to read more about technology instead of testing results. Some questions though:1. higher frequency: I am kind of skeptical that the overall higher frequency is mostly enabled by FinFET. Maybe it is the case, but for example when Intel moved to FinFET we did not see such improvement. RX480 is not showing that either. It seems pretty evident the situation is different from 8800GTX where we first get frequency doubling/tripling only in the shader domain though. (Wow DX10 is 10 years ago... and computation throughput is improved by 20x)
2. The fastsync comparison graph looks pretty suspicious. How can Vsync have such high latency? The most latency I can see in a double buffer scenario with vsync is that the screen refresh just happens a tiny bit earlier than the completion of a buffer. That will give a delay of two frame time which is like 33 ms (Remember we are talking about a case where GPU fps>60). This is unless, of course, if they are testing vsync at 20hz or something.