Introduction

NVIDIA released their GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 not 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.



Today, we are testing the MSI GTX 1070 Gaming Z. An upgraded version of the MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X, it features higher clock speeds and an illuminated MSI logo with RGB color support on the back.

Out of the box, the card comes overclocked to a base clock of 1633 MHz, which is a significant increase from the NVIDIA reference clock of 1506 MHz. Memory has also been overclocked to 2027 MHz. Currently, the MSI GTX 1070 Gaming Z retails at $460, which is about 15% more than the cheapest GTX 1070 you can currently find.