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Nvidia GTX 1070 Founders Edition Graphics Card Review

Rating: 9.0.

Back on May 17th Nvidia released their flagship, cutting edge GTX 1080, and today we look at the second card based on their Pascal architecture. The GTX 1070 Founders Edition is built on the 16nm FinFET manufacturing process and is priced to target a wider audience. That said, at around the £400 mark gamers will still demand high levels of performance, particularly as the adoption of 1440p gaming panels continues to increase.

As with the GTX1080 launch, Nvidia have released their GTX 1070 ‘Founders Edition' card first with pricing set at $449 and third party partner cards said to enter the market at $379. We expect UK stock to hit soon with prices starting close to £350 with higher grade, more expensive, modded cards from the likes of ASUS likely to hit around the £400 mark.

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The power delivery of the GTX 1070 Founders Edition is designed with a low impedance power delivery network, custom voltage regulators and a 4 phase dual FET power supply, optimised for clean power delivery. Nvidia claim the power system of the GTX 1070 is more efficient than the GTX 970. Nvidia also optimised the power delivery network on the PCB for low impedance.

The GTX 1070 Founders Edition also incorporates a new low profile backplate with a removable section to help airflow when using multiple cards in SLi configurations. It is set for release on June 10.

GPU Geforce GTX970 GeForce GTX980
Geforce GTX 980 Ti Geforce GTX Titan X Geforce GTX 1080 Geforce GTX 1070
Streaming Multiprocessors 13 16 22 24 20 15
CUDA Cores 1664 2048 2816 3072 2560 1920
Base Clock 1050 mhz 1126 mhz 1000 mhz 1000 mhz 1607 mhz 1506 mhz
GPU Boost Clock 1178 mhz 1216 mhz 1075 mhz 1076 mhz 1733 mhz 1683 mhz
Total Video memory 4GB 4GB 6GB 12GB 8GB 8GB
Texture Units 104 128 176 192 160 120
Texture fill-rate 109.2 Gigatexels/Sec 144.1 Gigatexels/Sec 176 Gigatexels/Sec 192 Gigatexels/Sec 257.1 Gigatexels/Sec 180.7 GigaTexels/sec
Memory Clock 7000 mhz 7000 mhz 7000 mhz 7000 mhz 5005mhz 4006mhz
Memory Bandwidth 224 GB/s 224 GB/sec 336.5 GB/sec 336.5 GB/sec 320GB/s 256GB/s
Bus Width 256bit 256bit 384bit 384bit 256bit 256 bit
ROPs 56 64 96 96 64 64
Manufacturing Process 28nm 28nm 28nm 28nm 16nm 16nm
TDP 145 watts 165 watts 250 watts 250 watts 180 watts 150 watts

The Nvidia GTX 1070 ships with 1920 CUDA cores and 15 Streaming Multiprocessors  – reduced from 2560 and 20 on the GTX 1080 respectively.  While the GTX 1080 is equipped with 160 Texture Units, the GTX 1070 has to make do with 120. The 8GB of GDDR5 memory runs at a data rate of 8Gbps.

Based on the same GP104 GPU used in the GTX 1080, the GTX 1070 has all of the key features that NVIDIA's Pascal architecture enables, including Simultaneous Multi-Projection. Nvidia claim the GTX 1070 has a 70% performance lead over the last generation GTX 970. While the GTX 1080 used GDDR5x memory, the GTX 1070 is shipped with fast GDDR5.

If you want to read more on the Pascal architecture, head to our page, over HERE.

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38 comments

  1. “As our review has highlighted however, the GTX 1070 blows the GTX 970 out of the water” – we it would wouldn’t it, that’s given in technology, nobody releases slower tech these days. Nvidia basically increased the price of their mid-tier cards x70 and x80 by £150 and £200 respectively. That’s around 50% increase compared to 970 and 980!! Lack of competition shows big time.

  2. I wouldn’t call the 1070 mid tier; it is high end with the 1080 as a top end card. The 1060 will be the new mid tier. Considering the current market, the 1070 is not crazy expensive. Decent pound to performance ratio.

  3. Wait till the RX480 is released at the end of this month, then the competition starts.

  4. No Witcher 3 at 1440 and 4k with or without the blood and wine expansion!!!! That’s the only results I was waiting for. I’m currently on a vapor-x 290X and was relying on the Witcher results to decide whether I should trade up, I have just finished the hearts of stone expansion at 1440p with 140 hours played and everything on ultra except the hair works, it would be interesting to see if the GTX1070 allowed hair works at those settings.

  5. Did you not read the paragraph before that statement were the price was discussed ? ‘I know Nvidia are comparing the GTX 1070 to the GTX 970 in their literature and briefings, but I can’t help but notice the GTX970 is quite often available at £250 – or £150 less. Thats a substantial chunk of change.’

    Not much point commenting like that if you are blowing things out of context…

  6. Havent had time yet for that one, sorry 🙁

  7. Very good GPU for the money you pay out. It keeps to or slightly ahead of a 980ti for a lot less. The over clock was not to bad also. I would assume the 3rd party cards will be more overclock friendly because of custom cooling & hopefully extra power pins to get that little extra boost & better cooling. Now to decide whether to go for a GTX 1070 or 2 of them. I currently have 2 Sapphire Tri-X 390x cards oc’ed to 1235Mhz cores & 1752Mhz (7008Mhz) on the memory & use maxed VSR in most every game without problems with speed. These cards would allow me to max Nvidias DSR but also use a lot less energy to do it. Not sure what I should do sell these 390x cards & get the 1070’s or just be happy I got a system that can handle pretty much everything I throw at it now.

  8. Jeramie NCG (No Commentary Gam

    Sigh..I’ve waited so long for some review website to release 2x 970 vs 1070 just like everyone is doing 980 SLI compared to 1080, why hasn’t anyone done it yet..

  9. I buyed 3 1080Ti’s for xfire and it is almost as quick ad my 970 Sli

  10. Matt McAlinden

    No one cares about your bragging post disguised as a question.

  11. Its year old high end. Titan x performance for $600 was already attainable with 980 ti. While the 1070 brings the price of that performance down it should be considered as 980 ti performance for $449 until we can buy cheaper cards. I get sick of these review sites padding the 1070 performance per dollar like you had to pay $1000 to get this performance before.

  12. Wow that overclocked 980 ti is almost matching the 1080. Considering the 1080 doesn’t gain much from overclocking I’m really disappointed with the 1080.

  13. Not bad for 150 watt TDP. On par with Polaris, But the price tag is too high in comparison if considering performance per dollar to the RX480. We need benchmarks before making a final decision. Hurry up already!
    Will it be the dual card Polaris or a single 1070? There’s just not information for myself to lock in my decisions.

  14. Currently prices for a 980ti range from €600 to €700; most are around €650. The 1070 performs on par for a €499 recommended price, which means it’ll probably be a bit cheaper (and give you a slightly smaller electric bill). Call me nuts, but a 20-25% lower price tag for the same if not slightly better performance sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

  15. In my country italy a gtx 980 ti costs around 560 euro.

  16. Netherlands has higher taxes maybe?

  17. Sorry if it seemed like bragging. I was actually raising the question of should people that have sim hardware like I stated actually upgrade to a 1070 or 1080 or just wait for the bigger & better chips from either AMD or Nvidia. This going on the rule of thumb that a bigger faster card is always better than 2 slower cards because of the way SLi & Crossfire are starting to not work as good with some of the newer games or we have to wait for game profiles to get the most out of 2 cards now days. I’m sure 1 big pascal or big Vega will trump 2 OC’ed 390x’s and no worries about game profiles or 2 980’s for those Nvidia people out there. I expect big pascal & Vega to be about 55 to 65% faster than a 980 Ti. Which in turn a 980 Ti is about 35 to 40% faster than 1 of my 390x cards a bit less because of my OC but the 98- Ti will over clock to 1500Mhz most times also. Anyways sorry if it sounded like I was bragging I was just stating my cards & their specs OC’ed to give a better picture on how they perform & if any one with same type of hardware will be upgrading to a 1070 or 1080 or waiting for the better & stronger cards in 6 to 8 months down the road & just go single GPU this time around…thanks

  18. No i don’t think so,22% of taxiation on this type of goods.

  19. Matt McAlinden

    Well on that basis I would say the general rules are: top end card over two mid range cards, always. Some games scale really well on multi GPU but others scale badly or not at all, which means for the same price you’re left with a single mid range card and another one sitting idle. The second rule of gfx cards is generally skip a generation. I’m on a gtx 670, and as I am still on only 1080p it can still play most games at fairly high settings with 2x AA to just take the edge off the pixels, I skipped the 7xx series as they were the same family just with more vram, so they were the same generation and then I skipped the 900 series as that’s the next gen and wasn’t a huge step up. I’m now looking at a 1080 or 1070, I’m still on 1080p so a 1070 should suit me fine, but I don’t want it to be my limiting factor in a couple of years as games advance or if I get a 1440p monitor, then be forced to buy a second 1070 with the scalability issues I described earlier. Which brings me to the final rule of gfx cards, buy the best single card you can afford…. And if you can afford it, get with the winning team (green 😉 ). You can always say the 1080 ti will be out next year but then the 1180 will be out a year after that and beat it, just like the 1080 has with the 980 ti. So just buy in at the current gen if your current PC isn’t giving you what you want then upgrade ever other gen.

  20. It’s decent but nowhere near as good as the hype train being perpetuated by the mindless tech community. Some sites are still quoting 2x titan x performance and believe it’s actually 2x faster in the traditional sense.

  21. Then I don’t know why there is such a major price difference.

  22. I don’t know; I try to not board the hype train 🙂 guess you now know which sites not to take seriously

  23. Because tons of fools still buy GTX 980ti new today.

    Best perf/dollar today is to grab a nice cheap one off second hand market.

  24. AMD is trying really hard to hide the fact that you need to put 2 RX 480’s in Crossfire to even get close to 1070 performance, and that the resulting price tag will still be higher while your in-game performance will have less stability and worse frame times than the single card solution.

    Once again it’s one of the worst ways to launch a GPU. ‘Hey look guys, our GPU is actually too weak in the current marketplace, just buy two and all is fine’. We’ve heard this before too, with an FX processor that chained eight cores in four modules, and was one of the worst CPU releases in the past few decades besides Intel’s Netburst junk.

  25. 2x 970 is one of the worst setups you could make with that specific card, because of its gimped VRAM segment which will really show up when you double up. That is also how the initial Shadow of Mordor benches surfaced with that card and brought the issue to light. Bottom line, if you run 2x 970’s now, start selling them off fast.

  26. You answered it yourself and you know you did. Upgrading for you is pretty much worthless except perhaps for the heat in your case and a few quid off the electricity bill.

    You’re trying to find justification for an upgrade itch, I know the feeling – just wait for 1080ti and Vega, will be much more worthwhile ^^

  27. Unless you want to assume that the Dutch are a lot more stupid than Italians, this does not account for a 100 euro price difference between countries 😉

  28. I agree about the CPU. They messed up. To get the same perormance as the Intel counterpart you had to overclock it and run it up to 200watts vs Intel’s 95 Watt TDP.
    Having to do that over three years time it’s no longer the bargain paying higher electricity for the same performance. TDP has everything to do wtih a purchase or it should. At least for us adults who care about it.

    I don’t know if I’d go as far to say they are hiding anything just yet. But it is suspicious that the pricing rumor went from 300 to 200 dollars for the Polaris card. But if two Polaris cards in DX11 or lower (DX12 irrelevant in this topic) is the same as a 1070 it’s not a good purchase at all. The TDP would be higher and the performance the same for the same amount of money?
    I agree with you.

    However, hiding it? If it is revealed later the performance is that of a 1070 it will come out that AMD dodged it at Computex. But so far they are handling things pretty well. But it does make you wonder did they drop the price juist before computex because the 1070 came out with its numbers and it startled them? Those are things to sponder and specualte. But until those benchmarks roll we wont know. What is of even more serious concern is Nvidia’s lack of response on this rendering issue. The lack of response is very telling that maybe it’s not AMD hiding anything. So it’s unclear to me why you’d say AMD is hiding something at this point when NVidia hasn’t responded to the rendering problems. Which would impact performance.

    That’s the bigger question for today. As far as AMD hiding anythign we will find out when benchmarks come. Right now we have a benchmark with evidence that snow wasn’t rendered in AOTS and its either driver bug. In any case Nvidia needs to provide a driver fix and the benchmark run again. Either way in DX12 Polaris appears to be the proven leader. DX11 and below it could be a turd. I guess we will find out. It’s a bit exciting to speculate , but my decision while it teeter totters like a bipolar graphic driver on whether or not the Polaris or 1070 will be my purchase. There is not enough data. But so far it doesn’t bode well for Nvidia. Already showing driver issues and cheating with NO RESPONSE is very bad. And it looks bad on them.

    So we wait. Either way Nvdia best respond to it . WIth a driver release or explanation.
    That will impact the purchase. And they do say if one person speaks up usually there’s 10 more in that same position around the world somewhere. They could be hiding something. If it is a showing that it has 1070 performance in DX11 and lower it wont be the Polaris Im purchasing. I cant justify purchasing something that would end up with higher TDP, like performance. Saving that 180 bucks immediately wouldn’t make sense. IF you bought the 1070 the 180 dollar difference over 3 years with a 150 watt TDP vs 300 watt twin Polaris the energy savings over 3 years would just about be that 180. You’d end breaking it even with a single card solution. As you can see I factor in every detail on a companies product to see what makes the most sense.

    Stay tuned on my verdict. I should start a website with that other guy Mr Pompous I called him. But he has as much experience in the “gaming” world. Just not in the business world.
    IT’d be a great website and he’s great. Insulting at times but, I like him.

  29. You can’t say they increased the price of their mid-tier cards really, today’s pricing reflects the fact that newer tech is releasing very shortly.
    Sure, the Founder’s Edition costs like £620 for the 1080 and £399 for the 1070 (at least that’s what I’ve read somewhere), but the non-FE cards start at £529, and I’d imagine the 1070s will be £319-£369 depending on brand-specific price gouging (looking at you MSI, £650 for your 1080, really??).
    The 970 was regularly £299 for aftermarket cards on Overclockers for many months out of the past year, without including today only/this week only/Black Friday sales.
    They’re effectively re-releasing a 980ti with a big more power, one year later for roughly the original price of a 970, give or take a few pounds. Sounds like a great deal to me.

  30. the 480 will appeal to gamers at 1080p most likely, anything higher and unless you’re really adverse to team green, you’d be wanting a 1070.

  31. Without mentioning the fact that the £150 difference comes as the product is nearing EOL status, the 1070 is intended to be its direct replacement. I know what I’ve just said is obvious and I’m not intending to demean you by saying it, I’m just saying that they can’t really compare it with any other card, as the 980 is both More expensive than the 1070, and also doesn’t fit into the same ‘tier’ as the 1070 🙂

  32. The easiest way to look at it is to check 980ti vs 1070 benches/comparisons. Two 970s perform roughly on par (+/- 5% or so) with a 980ti, depending on the games SLI capabilities. Also take into account resolution and in-game settings, we all know that whilst two 970s was supposed to be the 1440p ideal solution, the whole memgate issue thing did produce shortcomings in certain games (although most were quite fine!).
    A single 1070 is 100% the way to go, if you can offload your two 970s you could probably get the money to pay for a 1070 non-FE card and maybe have change leftover, and you’ll never run into vram issues, have a lower power draw, and lower temperatures to deal with, not to mention no SLI worries! 🙂

  33. Without quoting where they’re from, I’ve seen 3 different places that have performed those tests. All tested at 1440p with maximum available settings aside from HW which varied.
    Two of them tested with hairworks off, and got 71.5 and 73 average FPS respectively.
    The one place that tested with hairworks on, had it set to “on all” with 4x hairworks AA, and got 45fps average with a 63fps max…sadly hairworks seems to be a killer even now 🙁

  34. Okay, wow. I know the performance for the card is amazing, but really? $399 MSRP for aftermarket cards…the CHEAPEST one is £379, and it goes as expensive as £479 for the Asus, or £550 for the MSI Seahawk? SCREW YOU EU PRICING 🙁

  35. Christopher Lennon

    why? from the multiple benchmarks I’ve seen, the RX480 should be just a hair slower than the 1070 while being $175 USD cheaper

  36. Christopher Lennon

    what? according to all the information, the 1070 is DEFINITELY NOT twice as fast as a 480…where did you even get that information? AMD has already sgown that two 480s are FASTER than a 1080

  37. What benches are You seeing? Every bench I’ve seen so far has put the card anywhere from 50-80% of the distance between a 970 and a 980, sometimes almost equalling the 980 depending on the case. Two of them look great together, synthetically speaking of course, but as a single card it’s not supposed to be competing with the 1070 or 1080 in performance

  38. Gosin Nilratana

    Bro, do you even Witcher 3?