Introduction

NVIDIA announced the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti performance-segment graphics card at the beginning of this month. The GTX 1070 Ti is its latest (and probably final) implementation of "Pascal". It has been close to 18 months since the NVIDIA "Pascal" GPU architecture made its debut with the GeForce GTX 1080 back in May 2016. It enjoyed virtually zero competition from AMD for the most part, which took another 14 months to come up with something that could compete with the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 with the RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56 respectively. The enthusiast-segment GTX 1080 Ti and TITAN Xp remain unchallenged. NVIDIA may have erred in differentiating the GTX 1070 from its bigger sibling.



The GeForce GTX 1070 Ti is designed to fill the performance gap between the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080, but by being closer to the GTX 1080 than just halfway. This is probably necessary for it to outperform the RX Vega 56. While the GTX 1070 lacks a quarter of the 20 "Pascal" streaming multiprocessors (each worth 128 CUDA cores), the GTX 1070 Ti lacks just one. This takes its CUDA core count all the way up to 2,432, which is just 128 fewer than the 2,560 of the GTX 1080, a staggering 512 more than the 1,920 of the GTX 1070.

To not make the GTX 1070 Ti "too good," NVIDIA carried over the memory setup of the GTX 1070. You get 8 GB of older GDDR5 memory ticking at 8.00 GHz, which churns out 256 GB/s of memory bandwidth and is in contrast to the newer 10 GHz GDDR5X memory on the GTX 1080 (320 GB/s) and faster 11 GHz memory on the GTX 1080 refresh (352 GB/s). The clock speeds are another interesting mix. The GTX 1070 Ti has the base clock of the GTX 1080, but the boost clock of the GTX 1070. So the GPU Boost multipliers are rather restrained. These, coupled with the inherently better energy efficiency of the "Pascal" architecture compared to AMD "Vega," make for an interesting answer by NVIDIA to AMD's latest challenge.

Today, we are reviewing the EVGA GTX 1070 Ti FTW2 iCX, which features a dual-slot, dual-fan cooling solution on a custom PCB that comes with a strong VRM, 2x 8-pin power inputs, and EVGA's wonderful iCX sensor feature, which provides an additional eight thermal probes at strategic positions on the board. Regular pricing of the card is $500, but you can find it on sale right now for $480.

Packaging and Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Documentation + driver disc
• 2x PCIe power cable
• EVGA poster and stickers

The Card

EVGA's card looks great thanks to the combination of a plastic shroud with metal applications and a high-quality metal backplate. Dimensions of the card are 27.0 cm x 13.0 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include a DVI port, one HDMI port, and three DisplayPorts.

Unlike previous-generation NVIDIA cards, the DVI port no longer includes the analog signal, so you'll have to use an active adapter. NVIDIA also updated DisplayPort to be 1.2 certified and 1.3/1.4 ready, which enables support for 4K at 120 Hz and 5K at 60 Hz, or 8K at 60 Hz with two cables.

The GPU also comes with an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 2.0b compatible, which supports HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies. The GPU's video-encoding unit has been updated to support HEVC at 10-bit and 12-bit.


We shine the light from a self-leveling line laser onto the card, which shows no sagging.


Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back).

A Closer Look

EVGA is using a cooler with five heatpipes. The bottom of the thermal assembly also provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate consists of two pieces, just like on the NVIDIA reference design. EVGA's idea here is to keep heat from the VRM and GPU circuitries separated. Note the thermal pads here which provide a little bit of extra cooling for either circuitry.


A BIOS switch that lets you toggle to a second BIOS with a slightly higher power-adjustment maximum has also been added (the default power limit is 180 W for either BIOS). Both BIOSes are identical otherwise.


EVGA has upgraded the power input of their card to 2x 8-pin, which is specified for up to 375 W of power input. This seems a bit overkill given the card's power consumption tops out at 210 W at stock and the board power limit after adjustments is set to 217 W on the primary BIOS and 235 W on the secondary BIOS.


With Pascal, NVIDIA made some changes to how SLI works. In a nutshell, for 4K at 60 Hz and above, NVIDIA recommends new high-bandwidth SLI bridges it dubbed "SLI HB." These bridges occupy both SLI fingers. Traditional triple- and quad-SLI setups are gone as well. Only certain benchmarks can run more than the dual-SLI setup to which all games are limited.