The EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti FTW2 Review: iCX Brings the Lights and Sensors
by Nate Oh on January 31, 2018 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- EVGA
- GeForce
- NVIDIA
- GTX 1070 Ti
The Test
Returning to the topic of Spectre and Meltdown, there has been a flurry of security-related activity to address these exploits. The security fixes ultimately incur a performance penalty, though the penalty only measurably affects select cases, such as certain database and I/O-heavy workloads.
More relevant to us, is the workstation-level mitigations; in this case, Windows Updates and BIOS updates with microcode changes. And the various mitigations have run into a number of complications, such as random reboots and data loss on Intel processors, and freezing on AMD ones. And so there has been the emergency Windows patch days after Spectre and Meltdown were publicly disclosed, and just this week Microsoft released an emergency patch to undo an Intel microcode update that was responsible for the rebooting and potential data corruption issues. Now, the current industry guidance is to hold off on firmware updates until stable tested updates are available.
Incidentally, NVIDIA has also patched up their driverset to harden them against Spectre attacks. It was earlier misinterpreted that the GPUs themselves were vulnerable, but to reiterate quickly, GPUs do not engage in speculative execution, which is what these vulnerabilities apply to.
Suffice to say, we are looking into the effect of Spectre and Meltdown mitigations on our GPU benchmarks. For the time being however, including this review, benchmarks are being run without any Meltdown/Spectre mitigations enabled, allowing them to be comparable to our existing dataset.
For our review of the EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti FTW2, we have used NVIDIA's 388.71 driver. The 2017 benchmark suite remains identical to the one described in the GTX 1070 Ti Founders Edition review. Like all our other GPU reviews, gaming results are average framerates and/or framerates at the 99th percentile.
As always, we try to use the best performing API for a particular graphics card.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-7820X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | Gigabyte X299 AORUS Gaming 7 (BIOS version F7) |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX860i |
| Hard Disk: | OCZ Toshiba RD400 (1TB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill TridentZ DDR4-3200 4 x 8GB (16-18-18-38) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | LG 27UD68P-B |
| Video Cards: | AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 (Air Cooled) AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 AMD Radeon RX 580 AMD Radeon R9 Fury X NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti FTW2 iCX NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 388.71 AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.12.2 |
| OS: | Windows 10 Pro (Creators Update) |
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Stuka87 - Wednesday, January 31, 2018 - link
Good to see a GPU review up! Shame they are all impossible to buy for anything close to MSRP.matt321 - Wednesday, January 31, 2018 - link
I believe there's an error in the first chart. The 1070 TI FE has a 1x 8pin power, not 1x 6pin.damianrobertjones - Wednesday, January 31, 2018 - link
Once again: I don't really care about the max fps achieved by these cards, although nice to have, as I'm FAR more interested in the minimum rates. Can the cards maintain a healthy 60 fps, at all times, or do they dip (it low)? Etc.milkod2001 - Wednesday, January 31, 2018 - link
at 1440p yes, it canTitanX - Wednesday, January 31, 2018 - link
Guess my 580 will continue to soldier on the the time being..even in my next system build.dave_the_nerd - Wednesday, January 31, 2018 - link
A 970 would have been a nice addition to the benchmarks, since it was an incredibly common gaming card and the 1070 family is the logical upgrade path.Love your work though! :-)
CiccioB - Thursday, February 1, 2018 - link
A 980Ti would look nice too in those charts...b1gtuna - Wednesday, January 31, 2018 - link
Wait, 1080 costs $1K USD? I bought one at $650 in December...Le Québécois - Wednesday, January 31, 2018 - link
Same, I bought one for S550 just before Christmas. The funny thing is that I wasn't planning on a 1080, I wanted the 1070 but the price difference was only $50, probably because it was already being affected by the shortage.Seeing I was replacing a 6yo HD 7970, I'd say it's a good thing I didn't wait any longer.
Lord of the Bored - Thursday, February 1, 2018 - link
Man, I was GOING to upgrade back in early December, but I didn't like the pricing situation and was gonna wait a week or two for the next funnybux crash to drive prices back down....
Yeah, that didn't work out so well.