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Nvidia Geforce GTX 1070 Founders Edition review

by on03 October 2016

Index

Geforce GTX 1070 Specifications

gtx 1070 highlighted geforce 10 series specs

Nvidia Geforce 10 series specifications (Larger image here)

The Geforce GTX 1070 Founders Edition uses a GP104-200 Pascal GPU and the desktop version features 1920 cores, while the notebook version features 2048 cores. The card also uses 8GB of standard GDDR5 memory and features 6.5 teraflops of single-precision floating point performance. This number places the card right in between a Geforce GTX Titan X (7 teraflops) and the Geforce GTX 980 Ti (5.63 teraflops). The card features five display outputs, including three DisplayPort 1.2 ports (1.4 “ready” supporting 4K at 60Hz), one HDMI 2.0b port (4K at 60Hz), and one DL-DVI port.

For reference of Maxwell single precision, the Geforce GTX 980 Ti (June 2015) gets 5.63 teraflops, the Geforce GTX Titan Black (February 2014) gets 5.1 teraflops, the Geforce GTX 980 gets 4.61 teraflops and the Geforce GTX 970 gets 3.49 teraflops.

nvidia hb sli bridge sizes

Nvidia’s Geforce Pascal series also support the company’s new High Bandwidth SLI bridge that is claimed to double the available transfer bandwidth over Maxwell. From what we have read, however, this claim doesn’t hold for every single game based on initial reports and will reach variable performance at 4K and higher resolutions depending on the title. Even for games where there is no framerate advantage over single or dual SLI bridges, the HB SLI bridge can still provide an internal benefit for frame quality and screen tear reduction.

Physical dimensions

As for physical dimensions, this is a dual-slot card measuring 4.375 inches tall and 10.5 inches long. It is a tight fit in some ATX cases or E-ATX cases with radiators and water cooling configurations. In fact, we had a difficult time getting the card to fit inside a SilverStone Raven RV02 with a 280-millimeter Corsair H110 radiator and dual 140mm fans seated at the bottom of the case. With this type of cooling setup the card would only fit in PCI-Express Slot 4.

Of course, if you are running an Intel Core i7 CPU with only 28 PCI-Express lanes such as the Core i7 4820K or 5820K, you will soon realize that Slots 2 and 4 only run at PCI-E 3.0 x8 bandwidth (7.88GB/s) on most X79 and X99 motherboards, rather than full x16 bandwidth (15.76GB/s). Later in this review, however, we explain how PCI-E 3.0 x16 actually is not needed for a majority of recent titles unless they require heavier post-processing workloads on the CPU.

Pricing

The price has gone up for owning Nvidia’s midrange performance card this generation, as the previous GTX 970 launched at $329 in September 2014. The Geforce GTX 1070 is now available at $379 for standard models while the Geforce GTX 1070 Founders Edition sells for $449. As of October, the cards are still selling around the same retail prices as AMD prepares more Polaris products over the next few quarters.


Last modified on 05 October 2016
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