MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Aero ITX OC Review - Introduction

MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Aero ITX OC 8GB
Magnificent Gaming & Cooling Performance On The Smallest 17 cm Form Factor

We'll review the petite and tiny MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Aero ITX 8G OC. Aimed at the small form factor DiY PC gamer, this somewhat budget graphics card launches at roughly 449 USD, the smallest GTX 1070 you'll have seen and the most silent we have tested of all 8GB versions. We test the 17 cm long MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Aero ITX 8G OC (Mini-ITX) graphics card. The product does not vary much from any other 1070 other than its size. 

The  GeForce GTX 1070  is fitted with a high-end Pascal GP104 based GPU. A product series was to replace the GeForce GTX 980. The card has a nice dark aesthetic feel and comes with the new revised ACX cooler. 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 1920 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.

 
MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Aero ITX OC with the Nvidia GP104-A1 GPU ( 1,531 MHz base / 1,721 MHz boost / 8 GHz memory )