The Geforce GTX 1070 is one of the best high-end graphics cards by Nvidia that offers great value-for-money. It is designed to provide maxed out smooth 1440p gaming experience without making any compromises. Nvidia even claims that it can deliver performance on par with the Titan X which costs twice its price. The GTX 1070 shares common “Pascal” DNA with the GTX 1080 which makes it a performance beast and a great option for PC builder who doesn’t want to compromise on performance without spending a fortune.
- Design:
We were able to get our hands on the Founder Edition of the Geforce GTX 1070 which typically costs a little more but that is not because it provides better performance. Nvidia says that the premium price for the Founders Edition is purely for the high-quality materials and design craftsmanship. You get the same aesthetics of the expensive GTX 1080. The chassis is made up of angular die-cast aluminum measuring at 4.3×10.5-inch. For cooling, there are three copper heat pipes and an exhaust fan towards the end which blows out hot air through the vents present at the back making it a good option for compact PCs. The input-output options include three DisplayPort connectors, one HDMI port, and one dual-link DVI port.
- Architecture:
The Nvidia Geforce GTX 1070 is powered by the latest Pascal architecture which is based on GP104. This new architecture plays a vital role in the increased performance over the Maxwell GPU architecture and uses a smaller lithography of 16nm compared to the 28nm process, this helps in reducing the chip’s fabrication nodes.
The Pascal architecture allows cramming in more transistors on the smaller piece of silicon which reduces power consumption. It also enables to fit in 1,920 CUDA Cores which greatly increases computing performance.
The clock speeds are also really impressive, the graphics card runs at a base core clock of 1506MHz and a boost clock of 1683MHz. Also, the new architecture brings features like HDR, Simultaneous Multi-projection, GPU Boost 3.0, Ansel, VR Works Audio and Fast Sync.
It also features Nvidia’s take Async compute technology, used by AMD which enables the GPU to work much faster by performing graphics and computing tasks at the same time. They call their version of the tech “pre-emption” and works slightly differently, it basically allows the GPU to work more intelligently by choosing which process to prioritize.
- Specifications:
The GTX 1070 comes loaded with 8 Gigabytes of GDDR5 memory clocked at 8GHz and features a 256-bit bus for 256GB/sec of memory bandwidth. It is not as fast as the latest 8GB of GDDR5X memory used in the GTX 1080 which has a clock speed of 10,000 MHz but it will perform great for regular gaming requirements. It is a great improvement over the last gen’s GTX 970 which featured 4 GB of GDDR5 memory with a much lower clock speed.
The increased GPU clock speeds are thanks to the new TSMC’s 16nm FinFET production process. The GTX 1070 also features 7.2 billion transistor count and 64 Render Output Units (ROPs) as the GTX 1080.
- Performance And Benchmarks:
We tested out some of the recent games like Rise of the Tomb Raider, Hitman, Overwatch, Witcher 3 etc at maxed out settings and 1440p resolution and were easily able to achieve the 60 FPS mark.
In most games, the frame rate mostly stayed above the 60 FPS mark, even in Metro Last Light which is a very graphics intensive game with tons of physics and lighting effects the GTX 1070 scored an average FPS of 40.
The benchmark performance was also really great, we tested it on Unigine Valley and 3D Mark 11 extreme and this GPU easily headed over the Titan X.
- Final Verdict:
The Nvidia Geforce GTX 1070 is the best graphics card to buy if you want judder-free 1440p gaming experience without breaking your bank. You can also try out 4K in some less visually demanding games. It features Nvidia’s greatest Pascal GP104 GPU which provides beastly performance and a great value for money. It is also VR Ready if you are into that and even makes Nvidia’s claim of this card is faster than the Titan X somewhat true. You can buy it from Amazon here.