The Geforce GTX 1080 tops the performance of the $1499 Titan X card for $1299. The Geforce GTX 1070 basically matches it for under $800. That’s just nuts.
Easily living up to the label of the most powerful graphics card yet, the Pascal powered Geforce GTX 1080 has been getting the lion’s share of attention since Nvidia announced it earlier this month. But the benefits of more efficient operation, smaller die size and advanced architecture were also gifted to the Geforce GTX 1070. It may not be Nvidia’s new flagship card, but it still keeps pace (and sometimes surpasses) the company’s former flagship at around half the cost.
By jumping ahead technology generations, Nvidia has stomped all over its previous power elite. The poor, poor Titan X, with its $1499 plus price tag, is going to need a substantial discount if anyone is going to buy one once the Geforce GTX 1070s drop on June 10.
I had some time to play with the Founder’s Edition Geforce GTX 1070 over the past week, removing the 1080 I’d reviewed previously and replacing it with a less powerful card, which is never a good feeling. It helped that the exterior of the card is essentially the same faceted deign of its big brother.
It’s quite a bit different on the inside, however. The vapour chamber cooling system of the 1080 is replaced with a heat pipe assembly. While the 1070 is based on the same GP104 GPU as the 1080, it’s got fewer CUDA cores to play with (1920 versus 2560), fewer texture units (120 versus 160) and boasts slower clock speeds (core 1506 MHz versus 1607 MHz). And while the 1080 features new 10Gbps GDDR5X memory, the 1070 sticks with 8GB of good old GDDR5 running at 8Gbps. Check out full specs at Nvidia’s official page.
Despite the hardware differences, the GTX 1070 is still a Pascal-based graphics card, featuring all of the bells and whistles that comes with — simultaneous multi-projection, fast sync for older games that want to run way too speedy, support for Nvidia’s Ansel 360 degree screenshot technology and a relatively easy overclocking experience (as long as you don’t mind fan noise).
So while the GTX 1070 might not be quite as advanced as the more expensive 1080, it still delivers next-generation GPU technology at a much nicer price.
Mind you the Founder’s Edition card I played with costs a bit more as part of Nvidia’s ‘let’s charge more for our reference models’ initiative (though Australian pricing hasn’t been revealed yet). Third-party cards are expected to retail at $800, and who knows what sort of bells and whistles they will be screwing onto these puppies.
Whether you opt to pay the extra cash or not, you’re getting an outstanding price versus performance ratio with the Geforce GTX 1070. I tested the same seven games I did with the 1080 on highest settings, and the numbers were pretty much on par with benchmarks for the $1499 Geforce GTX Titan X.
Once again I didn’t bother listing 1920 x 1080 scores, as the 1070 readily surpassed the 60 frames per second target for everything I threw at it — even Metro Last Light, the most dickish of benchmarks.
Take a look.
Passable 2560 x 1440 performance on all but two games, which again is right on par with the Titan X. It’s nowhere near the 4K powerhouse of the GTX 1080, but for the price it’s still a hell of a card.
Unfortunately I did not have a Titan X on hand to compare, but our friends at Techspot put the 1070 up against it and a slew of other cards. Here’s a taste.
Most of the comparison benchmarks at Techspot tell the same tale. The Titan X and its much cheaper sibling neck-and-neck at every turn, with the Radeon R9 Fury X dancing around them.
With a power versus price ratio that’s through the roof, the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1070 is primed to become one of the most popular graphics cards of this hardware generation. While the GTX 1080 is going to turn a lot of heads, the 1070 is the one that’s going to open wallets.
Comments
18 responses to “Nvidia Geforce GTX 1070 Review: The New Sweet Spot”
I think I will be holding out for a strix version or something, word on the street is that these cards run a bit too hot for the reference cooler.
Hoping the non founders GTX1070 comes in around $699AUD or less
Waterblock ftw.
They do have heat/throttling issues.
But from what I’ve seen on a few review/benchmark videos, it is because the fan isn’t running all that fast out of the box. Supposedly if you simply bump fan speed a little they are perfectly fine.
Iv seen a few videos and reviews over this, from what iv seen everyone has had to manually raise the fan speed or thermal limit to get around this but that just creates its own problem.
For best results just add water 😉
Don’t get me wrong, I agree that people having to raise the fan speed themselves could have been easily avoided. But it’s really not that hard to do either. And if you’re buying a card like this, I think you should already know how to do things like that, or be willing to learn.
Realistically, if a person doesn’t know anything of the sort and still buys something like this then they’re likely the type of person who doesn’t even know what thermal throttling is… So when it’s happening they’ll just think some general performance slowdown is occurring.
Thats terrible logic, just because someone isnt a hardcore enthusiast who researches every detail, fault/flaw doesnt mean they shouldnt buy it, the cards advertised as ‘The best gaming card to date’ not ‘This card is only for people who know how to fix it when it breaks’.
Just because I bought an expensive car doesnt mean I need to know how it broke and how to fix it, thats why specialists exist (mechanics), exact same thing applies to computers.
Your post doesn’t make sense.
It’s not even remotely ‘hardcore enthusiast’ at all, its also got nothing to do with fixing anything that breaks. Changing fan speed is about as simple as downloading a program and clicking a button.
And NOT changing the fan speed won’t do anything… Thermal throttling is there to prevent issues, not cause them. The product isn’t broken/flawed. The only ‘problem’ here is that stock models use settings apparently well below what the hardware is actually capable of. As they pretty much always do.
As for your car analogy… If you blindly buy that car without checking into it any issues it might have, and potential ways to avoid/solve them, then you’re a fool. You may be a blissfully ignorant fool who gets lucky and has no problems, but you’ll be a fool nonetheless.
Id rather be ignorant than stupid
As someone keen on building a new gaming PC in roughly a months time (tax time!) I’m keen on seeing what the 3rd parties can do with this puppy in comparison to the 1080.
For similar reasons, I’m interested in the new AMD RX 480. Between that and this, it looks like they’ll generate a wide range of cards to cover pretty much every market except spreadsheet generals. Which dont need a dedicated GPU anyway.
Looking good in the GPU market for a while.
Im on the fence about this actually.
The base / boost clock of the 1080 is pretty impressive as is but im hoping it doesnt turn out like the latest AMD cards and already be pushed to its limits restricting factory overclocks.
But fingers crossed I can get a decent clock out of a GTX1070 on water
double post.. oops
The legend seems to be swapped in the first graphic…
Yeah I was going to mention that. Else its a card that does better at 4k then at 2560×1440, which would be crazy.
Yeah! Can you imagine how fast it’ll be at 8k???
Glad I’m not the only one who was thinking that.
Should be about $600 from the US. Not bad at all
need to change it to 7.5GB + .5GB memory