ASUS GeForce GTX 1070 STRIX Gaming review - Introduction

ASUS GeForce GTX 1070 STRIX Gaming
"You're Not Afraid Of The Dark, Are You?"

We review the ASUS GeForce GTX 1070 STRIX GAMING. It's factory customized and comes all tweaked and cooled so much better opposed to the founders edition. And it looks fantastic as well. Join me in a review of this 8 GB card from ASUS.

• 8 GB 256-Bit GDDR5
• Core Clock 1,657 MHz - OC Mode
• 1,632 MHz - Gaming Mode (Default)
• Boost Clock 1,860 MHz - OC Mode
• 1,835 MHz - Gaming Mode (Default)
• 1 x DVI-D 2 x HDMI 2.0 2 x DisplayPort 1.4
• 1,920 CUDA Cores
• PCI Express 3.0

The 1070 has been a hit ever since the its release a couple of weeks ago. Crazy stuff, and that is testimony to the fact that you guys have been waiting very long on the new graphics cards from both AMD and Nvidia. It's for good reason, the graphics card industry, or the GPU industry has been on hold, waiting for a smaller GPU fabrication process to become viable. Last generation GPUs were based on a 28 nm fabrication, an intermediate move to 20 nm was supposed to be the answer for today’s GPUs, but it was a problematic technology. Aside from some smaller ASICs the 20 nm node has been a fail. Therefore the industry had to wait until an ever newer and smaller fabrication process was available in order to shrink the die which allows for less voltage usage in the chips, less transistor gate leakage and, obviously, more transistors in a GPU. The answer was to be found in the recent 14/15/16 nm fabrication processors and processes with the now all too familiar FinFET + VLSI technology (basically wings on a transistor). Intel has been using it for a while, and now both Nvidia and AMD are moving towards such nodes as well. Nvidia is the first to announce their new products based on a TSMC 16 nm process fab by introducing Pascal GPU architecture, named after the mathematician much like Kepler, Maxwell and Fermi. That stage has now passed, the GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080 have been announced with the 1080 slowly becoming available in stores as we speak, the 1070 cards you'll start to see selling by next week (June 10^th 2016). Both cards are equally impressive in it's product positioning, though I do feel the 1070 will be the more attractive product due to it's price level, the 1080 cards really is what everybody want (but perhaps can't afford). The good news though is that the board partner cards will sell for less opposed to the Nvidia reference / Founder Edition cards. Obviously the higher-end all customized SKUs will likely level with that founders edition card price level again, but I am pretty certain you'd rather spend your money on a fully customized AIB card that is already factory tweaked a bit opposed the the reference one. The GeForce GTX 1070 is all about that Pascal GP104 GPU, yet for obvious reasons had to be slowed down a bit opposed to the 1080. The GeForce GTX 1070 might have the same GP104 GPU housed on it's PCB as that 1080, however it is a cut-down version of the GPU as Nvidia stripped away some segments. Where the GeForce GTX 1080 has 2560 shader processors, the GeForce GTX 1070 has 1,920 shader processors. This means it is has 15 out of the 20 SMs active (15 streaming multi-processors x 128 shader cores). In order of magnitude, the secondary biggest change is the memory type being "regular GDDR5" memory and not the new and hip GDDR5X. That memory is clocked at 2,000 MHz which is 8 GHz (GDDR5-effective) at a memory bandwidth of 256 GB/s. The two differences are responsible for a performance drop from 9 TFLOP/s Single-precision floating point performance for the GeForce GTX 1080 towards 6.45 TFLOP/s for the GeForce GTX 1070. The ASUS GTX 1070 STRIX GAMING fitted with a Pascal GP104 based GPU is a product series that actually was released is to replace the GeForce GTX 980. It's all custom with 6 GPU + 1 memory power phases, has a nice dark aesthetic feel and comes with the latest iteration of the DirectCU III cooler with Direct-GPU contact heatpipes (the heatpipes literally touch the GPU). Much like all premium graphics cards (aside from the founders edition) that we tested up-to 60 Degrees C the card will even stay in passive mode, e.g. the three fans will not spin. The ROG STRIX GTX 1070 cooler is also fitted with an RGB LED system that lights up both the front and backside in a very tasteful manner, it's called the Aura RGB LED lighting system. We'll take a closer look at that in the photo-shoot of course. The ROG STRIX GeForce GTX 1070 has been fitted with one 8-pin power connector and at the backside you'll find a matte black solid back-plate.

The card has its clock default frequencies set at 1,835 MHz (boost) / 1,633 MHz (base) with a reference clocked 8 GB GDDR5 / 8,000 MHz effective data-rate on the memory. We test at default straight out of the box performance. Let's head on-wards in the review. We'll start with a product overview in the photo-shoot.

ASUS GeForce GTX 1070 STRIX Gaming with the Nvidia GP104 GPU ( 1,633 MHz core / 1,835 MHz boost / 8,008 MHz memory )