The Gigabyte GTX 1070 Xtreme Gaming is one of the highest-clocked GTX 1070 variants available at this time, running at a base clock of 1671 MHz out of the box, and memory is overclocked as well. This makes the card the fastest GTX 1070 we have tested so far; gaining 7% in performance over the reference design, it reduces the gap to the GTX 1080 to 12%. The AMD R9 Fury X a massive 20% behind, there really is no noteworthy competition for the GTX 1070 aside from that.

Gigabyte's cooler does an excellent job at keeping the card cool, running the card at only 66°C under load, which makes for quite a large difference to the next-coolest GTX 1070. Other cards are running at above 70°C. This results in more fan noise, though, it being slightly higher than with the quietest GTX 1070s, like the MSI Gaming Z. Gigabyte basically chose to trade a drop by a few degrees Celsius for a little more fan noise. I would have done it the other way around personally because a few degrees more or less have zero effect on anything, but less noise lets you enjoy whatever you're doing more. Don't get me wrong, the card isn't noisy in any way, it's just slightly louder than competing products. In idle, the fans stop completely for the perfect noise-free experience during desktop work, Internet browsing, and even light gaming. Gigabyte even included adjustable RGB lighting if you fancy that. Having a triple-slot cooler design is also no big deal anymore in my opinion because NVIDIA seems to be looking at getting rid of SLI in the future, and game developers really don't care much about it either, so support for it is getting worse and worse with every new title.

Gigabyte's card includes an additional two HDMI connectors near the front, which are for VR headsets. Since the NVIDIA GPU cannot support that many active outputs at the same time, Gigabyte implemented a switching logic that automatically toggles between 1x DVI, 3x DP, 1x HDMI and 3x DP, 3x HDMI depending on which monitors are connected (the switch does require a reboot, though).

Just like on all Pascal cards, power efficiency is amazing, with huge improvements over the Maxwell architecture that is already highly efficient in the first place. Gigabyte's card uses quite a bit more power than the reference design, which is not completely offset by higher performance out of the box, resulting in a 17% decrease in performance per watt - more than on any other custom GTX 1070 we have tested so far. That's the route you have to take to squeeze more performance out of Pascal, though; efficiency goes down as you increase clock speed. Gigabyte chose to upgrade the power configuration of their board to 8+6 pin, which isn't completely unreasonable because they also increased the board power limit.

With a price of $460, the Gigabyte GTX 1070 Xtreme Gaming is pretty expensive, especially when compared to the $380 the cheapest GTX 1070s can be found at now. Of course, there is the large overclock out of the box, which saves you the hassle of manually overclocking the Gigabyte card. If manual overclocking is no problem for you, such reasoning doesn't apply. The card also offers additional features, like RGB and additional HDMI outputs, but overall, I think the card should be priced below $440.