Wednesday, November 1st 2017
ZOTAC Avoids NVIDIA GTX 1070 Ti Factory Overclocking Restrictions via OC Profile
NVIDIA's decision to prohibit AIB partners from factory overclocking their GTX 1070 Ti graphics is a decision that may not sit well with hardware enthusiasts, but it's one that makes the most sense from a business perspective. As it is, it's expected that overclocked versions of the GTX 1070 Ti graphics cards, which have come to offer a more compelling NVIDIA option against AMD's Vega 56 graphics card, will offer performance that is by all accounts comparable to that offered by its more expensive (and older) GTX 1080 graphics cards. So NVIDIA is just ensuring that its introduction of the GTX 1070 Ti with its $459 MSRP doesn't cannibalize sales of their higher tier graphics card through higher out-of-the-box performance via factory overclocking.
This generates some issues for AIB partners, since now they have one less data point to help them differentiate their products from competitor's: performance. The only indirect claim to performance they now have is through efficiency of their cooling solutions, but that's a cloudy metric at best; as such, companies are finding ingenious ways to avoid going up against NVIDIA's restrictions, while offering some differentiating factors to their GPUs.
Case in point, ZOTAC will be including, via their FireStorm utility, the ability for GTX 1070 Ti users to select from a cadre of performance profiles that are pre-programmed on the software suite - as opposed to being automatically applied from factory. This means that ZOTAC can comply with NVIDIA's clock demands, while offering users an easily observable way of increasing performance. It's expected that more AIBs will follow suit with this implementation. One example profile that ZOTAC will make available for their GTX1070 Ti AMP! Extreme graphics card unlocks 140% power limit (252 W) and a +150 MHz overclocking on base core clocks, raising the boost clock to 1833 MHz.
Of course, there's always the question of whether or not this actually affects enthusiasts - or most TPU readers - at all. We generally tend towards acquiring the lowest priced option with the best cooling solution so as to allow us to achieve, through manual overclocking, performance levels that AIB partners would never be able to implement on volume production hardware.
Source:
Videocardz
Case in point, ZOTAC will be including, via their FireStorm utility, the ability for GTX 1070 Ti users to select from a cadre of performance profiles that are pre-programmed on the software suite - as opposed to being automatically applied from factory. This means that ZOTAC can comply with NVIDIA's clock demands, while offering users an easily observable way of increasing performance. It's expected that more AIBs will follow suit with this implementation. One example profile that ZOTAC will make available for their GTX1070 Ti AMP! Extreme graphics card unlocks 140% power limit (252 W) and a +150 MHz overclocking on base core clocks, raising the boost clock to 1833 MHz.
38 Comments on ZOTAC Avoids NVIDIA GTX 1070 Ti Factory Overclocking Restrictions via OC Profile
Bottom line: user overclocking is not prohibited on ANY of the Pascal cards, except on the one model Asus locked down. ONE
Its these:
Asus ROG STRIX-GTX1070-8G-GAMING
'8G' means artificially limited clockspeeds. I believe its 17xx Mhz on this one.
I don't care about vega or pascal now. Gimme volta!!!
Nvidia did this to squeeze the grapple hold on the monopoly they have. God forbid AMD Vega 56 held a small segment of price / performance competition (after the mining inflation settles down) to them. Business as usuals even if it means undermining thier customers with these type of releases.
Their top-tier GPU's are so much ahead of RTG they are limiting the overclocking on purpose since Maxwell. There are other reasons to do it, but this is setting the stage for graphics cards in the foreseeable future. Now cards start to throttle at 70c, what the hell!? What happened to being able to run into 90-100c, run full clocks and be completely fine... It would be more appropriate to be able to turn off these "safety" measures. I don't like how graphics card overclocking is being treated.
I can imagine Volta already having marginal improvements over Pascal in performance when they lock true performance behind a pay-wall. They're just going to boast how performance-per-watt is the holy grail (again) when they put HBM on the die and blow mist into people's eyes.
Not that ranting in a forum helps anyway.
Edit: where is tpus gtx1070ti review, anandtech has review up all ready?
www.anandtech.com/show/11987/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1070-ti-founders-edition-review
Volta will be like the second generation of Kepler , probably even more underwhelming. That is , if they will even bother with it at all.
Volta is also packed with compute features , which they wont make available to the consumer line , so it will be a slightly higher clocked/larger Pascal.
and lets not forget the artificial limit/ceiling they put on the gtx1000 series in general, yeah nothing wrong with that either.... go Nvidia....
Jeez you are able to swallow a lot.
oh and they actually market them as overclocking monster?
wow its almost as if marketing is suppose to sell cards.. really weird they would not market them as stagnant turds right, or tell the customers their cards are made to not OC too far so they can sell you new card asap and make moar moneyz....
Next thing you will tell me they market 3.5 gb card as 4gb :O
AMD has the same limits on them too (power limits).
That said, as jabb already mentioned that users will be able to overclock through software. MSI AB works and so will the gaming app once updated.
The 970 is a 4GB card. 500MB run slower.
Haters gonna hate hate hate.. shake it off, shake it off.. woohooHOO!!!!
And yes gtx1070ti it's not OC monster, by the reviews I have seen. Best OC pascal card was that first titan x and only because of low default clocks.