HiGame

The GTX 1070 isn’t at the top of Nvidia’s product stack. That said, it’s probably the most interesting card available for gamers who want high-end performance, but can’t afford to drop ridiculous amounts of money on an ultra-high-end GPU. Gigabyte was kind enough to send over its G1 Gaming GTX 1070, and we’ve put the card through its paces.

We’ve already talked about the GTX 1070’s architecture, but since this is our first Pascal review, let’s take a moment to review the core. The GTX 1070 has 1,920 CUDA cores, 120 texture mapping units, and 64 ROPS (this is often written as a 1920:120:64 configuration). It uses 8GB of conventional GDDR5 clocked at 8Gbps for 256GB/s of memory bandwidth. It doesn’t pack quite the oomph of the GTX 1080 — it’s functionally limited to setting up 48 pixels per clock, for one thing, even if it technically has all 64 ROPS.

General benchmarks have already shown the GTX 1070 to be a tough customer, capable of besting Nvidia’s previous GTX Titan X GPU. So what does Gigabyte bring to the table with its G1 Gaming GPU? As it turns out, a fair bit.


Gigabyte’s G1 doesn’t use Nvidia’s reference-style blower. Instead, it offers three separate fans in an open-aired cooler. Whether you prefer a blower or an open-air cooler is partly a matter of taste and partly a matter of airflow. Because a blower exhausts hot air directly from the second PCI Express slot, they’re typically considered a better solution for low-airflow cases. If your case doesn’t run hot, there shouldn’t be much of a performance difference between the two.

more...