The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Founders Edition Review: GP104 Comes in Threes
by Nate Oh on November 2, 2017 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- GeForce
- NVIDIA
- Pascal
- GTX 1070 Ti
Meet the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Founders Edition
For the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Founders Edition, pinned at the official MSRP of $449, NVIDIA has essentially plopped the GTX 1070 Ti GPU into a GTX 1080 board. This makes a lot of sense considering that this late-cycle card has the same GPU and 180W TDP requirements of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080. Doing so allows NVIDIA to drop in the new specification and go with minimal changes, and similarly, their partners can take their own GTX 1080 designs and quickly reconfigure them for the GTX 1070 Ti.
The end result of this decision is that the GTX 1070 Founders Edition has the same power delivery and cooling specificaitons as the GTX 1080. Which is to say that it retains the same vapor chamber + blower cooling design, and the same 5+1 dual-FET power design. Similarly, that means the GTX 1070 Ti also has the same 120% power limit, and so extending the TDP to 216W. Otherwise, the PCB is exactly the same as the GTX 1080.
It is notable that the GTX 1070 Ti Founders Edition gets the vapor chamber cooler, as the card does not carry a price premium like the other Founders Edition cards do; NVIDIA is not charging more than their partners here. As a high efficiency cooling solution, the vapor chamber works well with the GTX 1070 Ti's increased (relative to the GTX 1070's) 180W TDP and 120% power limit. And while the blower fan is not the quietest, the Founders Edition is able to boost well past its paper-specified clockspeeds.
As we weren't provided with the GTX 1070 Ti PCB photos, we are using the GTX 1080 PCB with GDDR5X modules as an example. As with previous NVIDIA reference PCBs, the 5 GPU power phase and 1 GDDR5 phase is fine for stock operation and mild overclocking, rather than catering to the needs of hardcore overclockers. While not a major point, the Founders Edition isn't really apt to be pushed as a real "overclocking" card; it will boost a little higher but the user experience won't be significantly affected.
Finally, given the identical-to-1080 board design, the rest of the specifications should not come as a surprise. The 10.5" card requires a single PCIe 8-pin power connector for additional power, which combined with the 75W of the PCIe slot, gives the complete card more than enough power for its 180W TDP. Meanwhile on the display side of matters, the GTX 1070 Ti has 3x DisplayPort 1.4, an HDMI 2.0b port, and 1 DL-DVI-D port. The GTX 1070 Ti does support SLI, like all Pascal cards from the GTX 1070 and up.
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BrokenCrayons - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link
This review was a really good read. I also like that the game screenshots were dropped from it since they didn't exactly add much, but do eat a little of my data plan when I'm reading from a mobile device.As for the 1070 Ti, agreed its priced a bit too high. However, I think most of the current-gen GPUs are pushing the price envelope right now. Except maybe the 1030 of course which has a reasonable MSRP and doesn't require a dual slot cooler. That's really the only graphics card outside of an iGPU I'd seriously consider if I were in the market at the moment, but then again I'm not playing a lot of games on a PC because I have a console and a phone for that sort of thing.
Communism - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link
Literally the same price as a 1070 non-Ti was a week ago.Those cards sold so well that retailers are still gouging them to this day.
Communism - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link
And I should mention that the only reason that retail prices of 1070, Vega 56, and Vega 64 went down is due to the launch of 1070 Ti.timecop1818 - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link
Still got that fuckin' DVI shit in 2017.DanNeely - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link
Lack of a good way to run dual link DVI displays via HDMI/DP is probably keeping it around longer than originally intended. This includes both relatively old 2560x1600 displays that predate DP or HDMI 1.4 and thus could only do DL-DVI, and cheap 'Korean' 2560x1440 monitors from 2 or 3 years ago. The basic HDMI/DP-DVI adapters are single link and max out at 1920x1200. A few claim 2560x1600 by overclocking the data rate by 100% to stuff it down a single link worth of wires; this is mostly useless though since other than HDMI1.4 capable displays (which don't need this) virtually no DVI monitors can actually take a signal that fast. Active DP-DLDVI adapters can theoretically do it for $70-100, but they all came out buggy to one degree or another and sales were apparently too low to justify a new generation of hardware that fixed the issues.Nate Oh - Saturday, November 4, 2017 - link
This is actually precisely why I don't mind DVI too much, because I have and still use a 1-DVI-input-only Korean 1440p A- monitor from 3 years ago, overclocked to 96Hz. DVI probably needs to go away at some point soon, but maybe not too soon :)ddferrari - Friday, November 3, 2017 - link
So, that DVI port really ruins everything for ya? What are you, 14??There are tons of overclockable 1440p Korean monitors out there that only have one input- DVI. Adding a DVI port doesn't increase cost, slow down performance, or increase heat levels- so what's your imaginary problem again?
Notmyusualid - Sunday, November 5, 2017 - link
@ ddferrariWhat are you - ddriver incarnate?
I'm older than 14, and I wish the DVI port wasn't' there, as it is work to strip them off when I make my GPUs into single-slot water-cooled versions. Removing / modifying the bracket is one thing, but pulling out those DVI ports is another.
Silma - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link
How can you compare the Vega 56 to the GTX 1070 when it's 7 dB noisier and consumes up to 78 watts more ?sach1137 - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link
Because the MSRP's of both the cards are same. Vega 56 beats 1070 in almost all games.yes it consumes more power and noiser too. But for some people it doesnt matter it gives 10-15% more performance than 1070. When Overclocked you can extract more from Vega 56 too.