Product: ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1070 Ti
Type: Graphics Card
Price: $799.00 RRP
Availability: Out Now

Just in time for the holiday season comes a new graphics card from Nvidia, the GeForce GTX 170 Ti. Which sees improvements made over the base GeForce GTX 1070 model to bridge the gap, performance-wise, between the more affordable 1070 series and the premium GeForce GTX 1080 line. And possibly take another swing at AMD just for fun. Announced and released in the space of a few weeks, we were lucky enough to get early access to the excellent ASUS ROG Strix version of the 1070 Ti, which overclocks the core clock speed to a figure that is definitely in the 1080 range - 1759MHz.

And more impressively, manages to do so by keeping the power consumption (1 x 8-pin PCIe) the same as the base 1070. Okay, so in normal person terms that means that the 1070 Ti offers up better performance without sacrificing anything the GPU gods or becoming a power-hungry beast capable of being a major factor in the next South Australia state-wide blackout.

Too soon?

Of Numbers and Heat Sinks

Anyway, to get a better picture of the new ASUS ROG Strix version of the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, we need to look at how the 1070 Ti numbers compare not only to the original and now vanilla GTX 1070 but also the GTX 1080. First up, comes the old CUDA Core count - which most of us kid ourselves into understanding exactly what that is. Basically, the higher the number the better, and the introduction of the 10 series and Pascal line of GPUs from Nvidia meant that the CUDA Core counts across the board offered up massive improvements over the 9 series when the 1070 rolled around.

The 1070 Ti isn’t as drastic as that, but close.

• GPU: GeForce GTX 1070 Ti
  
• CUDA Cores: 2432
  
• GPU Boost Clock: 1683MHz
  
• OC Boost Ckock: 1759MHz
  
• Memory: 8GB GDDR5 (8 Gbps)

With 2432 CUDA cores, the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti boasts 27% more graphics-processing horsepower than the base 1070 which only has 1920 CUDA cores. And we say only because in this game of comparing GPUs, anything less than the best is worth deriding. This boost puts it in striking distance of the GTX 1080’s 2560 CUDA cores. The 1683MHz Boost clock remains the same as the base 1070. As does the speed of the 8GB of GDDR5 memory. Which is a shame because many were hoping thath the 1070 Ti would include the 1080’s GDDR5X speeds of 11Gbps over the now standard 8Gbps.

But, on the bright side ASUS got the 1683MHz Boost clock to an impressive 1759MHz here. And thanks to the impressive cooling of the ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1070 Ti you can push that a lot further. In a closed case we were running at the standard OC mode of 1759MHz for quite a while with the temperature hovering at around 60 degrees Celsius the whole time. In fact, ASUS went all out with its silent design and impressively chunky “monster heatsink” (the same found in the 1080 Ti line). What you get is a cooling system where the fans don’t even kick in unless you’ve been gaming for a few minutes.

Game Performance

And really, what’s a GPU without games. Although our tests and benchmarks were carried out on a 1080p screen, the numbers showed definite improvements over the previous card – a Founders Edition 1070. Because well, our dog ate our 4K screen. And, umm, our 1440p G-Sync monitor got lost in the mail. It’s out on repair. Ahem. Truth is we’re still in the process of updating our gaming monitor, so we’ll be updating this review to showcase performance at higher resolutions later.

Anyway, head here to see a direct comparison in gaming performance between the ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1070 Ti and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition.

Naturally, the 1080p numbers are impressive – even with new titles like Assassin’s Creed Origins which looks nothing short of amazing when played on Ultra. Even Destiny 2, which isn’t in the chart above, ran with a frame-rate in the region of 130-180 fps. Yeah, the 1070 Ti is great for gaming, and compared to the 1070 performed in the region of 10 – 25 % better. Connected to a 4K TV for testing higher resolutions we could get DOOM running at a steady 60fps, and it looked incredible. And with overclocking made easy you can quite easily push things over the 2000MHz threshold for an even bigger jump in performance. Tasty.

Running a few 3DMark benchmarks and the improvements were in a similar range of 15% or so over the core 1070. Again this is without overclocking things even further, which the ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1070 Ti handles quite easily.

Overall

With a form factor a slot size of 2.5 the ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1070 Ti is on the top end of the spectrum for the new Nvidia GPU, not only in terms of performance and build quality but also size. That’s not to say it’s ugly, it isn’t. It has programmable RGB lighting that took less than a minute to sync up with our motherboard. Also, and this is not a small thing, but the provided GPU Tweak software is one the best GPU management tools that you’ll find. Offering simple overclocking and tracking of just about any stat you can think of, you can even create profiles that adjust not only the clock speed but voltage, fan speed, and target temperatures and frame-rates.

Even though it’s a tad pricey, if you’re in the market for a new GPU and power consumption and performance is a factor then you’d be hard pressed to look past the ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1070 Ti.