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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Le Québécois - Thursday, February 1, 2018 - link
I had been looking at the price for the GTX 1070/1070ti/1080 VEGA56/64 since early November. It's only the week before Christmas that I saw a slight price drop on some of the GTX 1080 on Amazon.ca. I was lucky enough to get a MSI GTX 1080 GAMING X 8G for $550.By the time I installed it a week later, it was already back above $700... and it only got worst from that point on.
I really hope your current card isn't as old as my 7970 was.
The funny/sad thing for me now is that I'm still only using a good old 12 yo 22" 1680x1050 monitor and almost all of the good 27" 2560x1440 are sold out near me right now :(.
CplShawn - Thursday, February 1, 2018 - link
I was still using my GTX580 until last week when it finally died. I got a 950 from a coworker for $40, and it's doing okay, the fan is very loud. I was looking forward to getting a 1080Ti, but there is no way in heck that I'm going to pay current prices.Lord of the Bored - Friday, February 2, 2018 - link
I've got a Radeon 380, 4 gig.I wouldn't even be looking to update right now if I hadn't grabbed a Rift during the summer sale. That bumped me just outside my comfort zone, which is a shame since it turns out I REALLY like VR.
Oh well, it is still servicable. I can stalling for a little more time.
DnaAngel - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link
And now you can get a 1080 for $550-$575 lol. It's all over the place.Crazyeyeskillah - Monday, February 5, 2018 - link
Can't wait to pay 800$+ for this card.DnaAngel - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link
The 1070Ti is marketed to compete with the Vega 56? Heck, in a good bit of these benchmarks, esp at 1440p, the 1070Ti is neck and neck with not the Vega 56, but the Vega 64, which is almost 2x the price LOL.And yet as of writing this, AMD still has the 56 at $630 and the 64 at $800. Just bought a GTX 1070Ti for $475 2 days ago to replace my R9 390 that just died.
DnaAngel - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link
I want what AMD is smoking. For the current price of a Vega 64, you can get a 1080Ti lol. Or you can save a few hundred and get a $475 1070Ti that matches or outperforms Vega 64 at 1080/1440p in most titles hahaha.