Introduction

NVIDIA released their GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 not too long ago, featuring the company's new Pascal architecture, a brand-new 16 nanometer production process, and GDDR5X memory. In our launch-day review, we were truly impressed by how well NVIDIA claimed the performance throne with the 1080, but also the GTX 1070 managed to impress with its high-end performance at an attractive sub-$400 price-point. The reference-design card, however, is sold at a $70 premium over the GTX 1070 Founders Edition sitting at $449.

The GeForce GTX 1070 uses the same Pascal GP104 graphics processor as the GTX 1080, with just 1920 enabled shaders instead of 2560, which also affects the number of texture units that are down to 120 from 160. With 64, the number of ROPs is the same, and so is the memory capacity of 8 GB. However, today's review subject, like all GTX 1070 variants, uses GDDR5 memory, unlike the GTX 1080 that comes with GDDR5X. GDDR5X offers twice the bandwidth at the same operating frequency, so NVIDIA is running the GeForce GTX 1070's memory at a frequency of 2 GHz in order to make up for that.



Gigabyte's GTX 1070 XtremeGaming is the company's highest-clocked GTX 1070 variant, featuring a large triple-fan, triple-slot cooler and a large overclock to a base clock of 1671 MHz out of the box; memory is overclocked as well.

The GTX 1070 Xtreme Gaming currently retails at $460, which is a significant increase over the cheapest GTX 1070 models that can be found for as low as $380 now.