Intro

The Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti Gaming OC 8G review

In November, BabelTechReviews purchased a Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti Gaming OC 8G video card from Amazon for $489 for the purpose of testing GTX 1070 Ti SLI. Since then, we have reviewed the Red Devil RX Vega 56 versus the GTX 1070 Ti Founders Edition, and found it a worthy competitor even though the Adrenalin 17.14.4 drivers are somewhat unstable. It is natural to compare aftermarket versions against each other, and now that AMD has released stable 18.1.1 drivers, we are going to review the Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti Gaming OC 8G versus the PowerColor Red Devil RX Vega 56 using 36 modern PC games.

The GeForce GTX 1070 Ti is NVIDIA’s latest Pascal GPU that was released on November 2. It is similar to the GTX 1070 although it is more powerful and closer to the GTX 1080 in performance. The GTX 1070 Ti was set to launch starting at $449 to fit in-between the GTX 1070 and the GTX 1080 both in price and performance. The GTX 1070 Ti competes directly with AMD’s RX Vega 56 which was originally supposed to retail for around $399. Unfortunately, the crypto-currency mining craze has decimated stock of most midrange and high-end GPUs, and unless you buy direct from NVIDIA or from partner stores, it is currently impossible to find video cards at suggested retail pricing

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We are going to focus on the Gigabyte GTX 1070 Gaming OC Ti’s performance against our PowerColor Red Devil RX Vega 56 which is also a premium AMD partner-designed video card. Above and below we see the massive Red Devil with 2×8-pin PCIe power connectors dwarfing the Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti which only needs one 8-pin PCIe connector. Both cards each rely on custom tri-fan cooling, and Gigabyte uses the Windforce 3X design. Our testing platform is Windows 10 64-bit, using a Coffee Lake Intel Core i7-8700K overclocked to 4.7 GHz for all cores as set in the EVGA Z370 FTW motherboard’s BIOS, and 16 GB of HyperX DDR4 at 3333MHz. The settings and hardware are identical except for the cards being tested. We benchmark 36 games and 4 synthetics, and we will compare gaming performance with maximum settings at 1920×1080, 2560×1440, and at 3840×2160.

The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1070 Ti OC edition vs the non-OC edition

The Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti Gaming OC 8G is the original edition that has a slightly higher factory overclock than that which was finally approved by NVIDIA (Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti Gaming 8G). All editions of the GTX 1070 Ti are clocked the same, being differentiated mostly by design, component choice, and cooling. Here is our Founders Edition of the GTX 1070 Ti’s steady 1809 MHz boost clocks looping Ultra/Extreme Heaven 4.0 at 2560×1440.

Since we got our card from the first 25,000 that were sent into retail, our Gigabyte factory original “OC” card boasts 26 MHz higher clocks than the GTX 1070 Ti Founders Edition as it is factory-clocked higher than all other aftermarket GTX 1070 Tis. We did not change the clocks nor update the BIOS, but instead we compared its performance with the Founders Edition of the GTX 1070 Ti and found the Gigabyte card to be only about 1-2% faster, so there is not a significant amount of performance gained from the extra 26 MHz. Even if the cards were clocked identically, we would still expect the Gigabyte edition to be slightly faster than the Founders Edition just because of better cooling. Our Founders Edition hits 84 C while our Gigabyte Gaming OC remains in the upper 70s C under identical conditions.

Here are the specifications from Gigabyte’s website for the (non-OC) GTX 1070 Ti Gaming 8G:

The specifications are quite similar for all GTX 1070 Tis, but Gigabyte’s Windforce 3 Cooling and other upgrades differentiate the Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti Gaming 8G video card.

The Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti Gaming 8G Features

The Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti Gaming 8G edition video card features Windforce 3X cooling with 3 unique blade fans and 2 composite copper heat pipes with direct contact to the GPU for a cool-running card. And it does run significantly cooler and quieter than the Founders Edition of the GTX 1070 Ti.

The GTX 1070 Ti Gaming 8G boasts that it uses the same capacitors as the TITAN video cards, and the power delivery has been upgraded over the Founders Edition. In addition, Gigabyte’s 3D Active Fan provides semi-passive cooling and the fans will remain off until the GPU comes under a heavy load which allows gamers to experience a completely silent video card at times. A LED fan indicator on the top of the graphics card provides a visual display of the fan status.

There is also RGB lighting on the card which can be coordinated by Gigabyte’s AORUS software which also provides overclocking functionality. We will look closely at this software in an upcoming overclocking evaluation pitting the Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti versus the PowerColor Red Devil RX Vega 56.

Overclocking the Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti Gaming 8G Edition

We didn’t spend a lot of time overclocking the Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti further above its factory clocks but we were able to add an additional 210 MHz to the core clocks and 420 MHz to the memory.

As a comparison, we were able to add only 200 MHz to the Founders Editions core clocks and 400 MHz to the memory clocks and the card ran a lot louder and hotter. In a future evaluation we plan to spend more time fine-tuning our overclocks for our Red Devil RX Vega 56 versus Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti OC Gaming 8G Showdown.

From what we have seen, the specifications of the Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti Gaming 8G Edition are impressive, and our sample clocked significantly higher than NVIDIA’s guaranteed GTX 1070 Ti clocks. Our limited edition OC version also clocks slightly higher than the Founders Edition or any other aftermarket GTX 1070 Ti.

Let’s take a closer look at the Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti (OC) Gaming 8G.