A Closer Look

NVIDIA's reference design cooler for the GP104-based graphics cards features a copper plate with a dense aluminum fin-channel array through which air is blown by the lateral fan. A base plate conveys heat from the memory and VRM MOSFETS onto this copper plate.


The backplate is made from metal to protect the card against damage during installation and handling. It comes apart in two pieces, so users with SLI setups in which the two cards have no space between them can detach the rear half of the bottom card to improve airflow to the top card.


The reference GTX 1070 Ti card draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, which is specified for 225 W power draw. Custom-design cards come with more connectors.


With Pascal, NVIDIA made some changes to how SLI works. In a nutshell, for 4K at 60 Hz and above, NVIDIA recommends new high-bandwidth SLI bridges it dubbed "SLI HB." These bridges occupy both SLI fingers. Traditional triple- and quad-SLI setups are gone as well. Only certain benchmarks can run more than the dual-SLI setup to which all games are limited.