Gadgetory

EVGA is gtx 1070 SC is priced at $440 making it sadly one of the most affordable gtx 1070 is presently available but prices should come down a bit because the low end is still 380 MSRP we haven't seen that hit market just yet though because as many of you have pointed out in comments the 1080 and 1070 are both very limited availability right now that means that they're very expensive in the case of the 1080 800 plus dollars if you can find it at all still though these cards from what we've been told by EVGA should become available on mass probably in the next month or so July is their expected time range for actual availability of these cards in a greater quantity than they are now the carbon reviewing today is the gtx 1070 SC it is stock clocked 100 megahertz faster than the reference design which is this one and that puts EVGA s card at 1784 megahertz core and it's also using the AC x 3.0 cooler which is the biggest change here as is often the case with AIB partner cards because the reference design cooler although Nvidia claims premium materials and what-have-you is actually pretty poor at cooling the GPU itself as we've shown so we're reviewing this thing today we're gonna be talking about its value overall fps metrics noise thermals overclocking things like that as always link in the description below for the article which has more charts than we'll be showing here and will hopefully give you some additional insight EVGA superclocked cards are their most affordable tier of pre overclocked GPU and this one sits about 100 megahertz faster than reference the gtx 1070 s he takes two expansion slots and is a more normal 4.4 inches height the same as the expansion slot height generally and makes it smaller than the gtx ten so d gaming x from msi that we also tested a CX 3.0 uses a dual fan design each with two ball bearings rated for long service life against a CX 2.0 the a CX 3.0 design uses a marginally thicker fan blade to reduce turbulence of the blade thereby reducing vibration and rattle within the fan should help control some of the noise overall and drop the whirring sound that we've heard in some previous models will test noise levels in a moment though like the Twin Frozr and Strix cards EVGA ACX 3.0 spins down to zero rpm when under minimal load in terms of processing or thermals and that means it produces effectively zero noise until the fans that spin back up a CX 3.0 also uses round heat pipes as EB J is done in the past but adds a conductive filler between the heat pipe M heat sink this helps improve the surface area for heat dissipation and spreading and is becoming more common as MSI with their twin frozer six card used square heat pipes when it connects with the cold plate so that's becoming a bit of a trend the heat sink on EVGA SC card is mounted to a base plate that contacts the vram and vrm components like MOSFETs with thermal pads in between the base plate and those components and is part of what makes up the a CX 3.0 cooler and is also what you'll find on the 1080 cards and other cards in the future as far as visuals a CX 3.0 gets a slight facelift versus the previous version of a CX which would be 2.0 and it now has LED backlights also new the gtx 1070 SC uses white LED backlights but the FTW cards will have RGB backlighting controllable through EVGA software all right so that's the walkthrough now we're going to do thermal benchmarking first just to bring everyone up to speed we represent these numbers in delta T over ambient that means we subtract ambient from the measured value there's a few good reasons for that I've discussed them before but very briefly the ambient temperature of a house environment even a thermal chamber fluctuates from second to second and those can be several degrees in some cases so we subtract that to normalize the results and also when you're looking at the results for your own environment you'll want to add back in your own ambient temperature is not going to be the same as here so that's why we do that these are delta T which means that you'll want to for this environment add in about 20 to 22 Celsius to get kind of our absolute value but just add in your own ambient for a better idea the gtx 1070 reference card has a maximum temperature of 50 3.86 Celsius under full load measured with a 1683 megahertz clock that's about 25 percent different from the MSI GTX 970 with Twin Frozr 6 cooling Landing at 40 1.77 Celsius when in OC mode at 1797 megahertz EVGA is at gtx 1070 SC with a CX 3.0 cooler is 13.8 4% different from the FE card and is at 46 point eight nine Celsius which puts MSI in the lead between the two but it's a much larger card so you have to keep that into account so here's a look at our noise data as you can see we test a few different ways first all the noise print at the bottom is the footprint of noise in the room before our test we've got 100% test where the fans are configured to 100% speed that is both fans in these cases we've got 50% tests where the fans both are running at 50% speed we have idle which in the case of the EVGA 1070 SC and the msi 1070 gaming X means they're running at 0 rpm so that is the noise of the system that be the PSU and the cooler the cv equal in this case and then we've got the auto test which shows what you should expect under normal gaming circumstances without a custom fan curve right now we're going to move on to FPS benchmarking we only have a few games in this video but article in the description below if you want to see the full charts for all the games we tested GTA 5 shows almost identical performance between the EVGA and msi gtx 1070 cards with the fe card only marginally behind at 1080p with very high and ultra settings the EVGA 1070 SC runs at 120 1.7 FPS average and 87.3 FPS 1% low which is identical to what the msi card is outputting with it's only 13 megahertz speed difference the 0.1% lows are the only location where we see a difference and the msi card is leading by a bit about 2 FPS or so at 4k similar results are netted MSI leading by 1 FPS average EVGA a leading the 1070 f-e by about 1.5 FPS so nothing exciting here but somewhat expected since we're really just comparing the same architecture GPU everything with different clock rates black ops 3 at 1080p it shows the GTX 1070 from msi at 175 FPS average and the 1070 SC from EVGA at 171 FPS average with the msi card sustaining generally higher 1% and 0.1% low values it's stable clock rate as some of this by the way that doesn't really mean that there's a noticeable difference at this obscenely high frame rate but there is a measurable difference the founders edition card sits at 166 FPS which is a difference of about 2.9 7% moving to 1440p we see the EVGA gtx 1070 SC and msi 1070 gaming XR effectively tied with the msi version of the card leading by 0.7 FPS again completely unperceptive all to the user the cards are for all intents and purposes identical in performance at this setting with this game and against the reference 1070 there's a slight gain of 4.2% moving to the 1070 SC from EVGA but that's about all we get at 4k the EVGA gtx 1070 performs at 55 FPS average and sustains highly timed 1% and 0.1% lows at forty three and forty point seven FPS respectively these are superior to the fury x which looks fine and its averages but fails massively in the 0.1% low department as a result of its limited vram capacity that creates noticeable stuttering and msi gtx 1070 gaming x doesn't have this issue it runs at 57 FPS average and that's a gain of three point five seven percent over the EVGA card the reference card is at fifty three point three FPS average and they're all pretty close at 4k mostly because it's such an abuse of setting anyway shadow of mordor puts the EVGA gtx 1070 at 121 point 7 FPS or just one FPS behind the msi 1070 and about one FPS ahead of the reference 1070 at 1440p we see a gap marginally widening between the aftermarket cards and that puts them at 86 FPS for EVGA and 18 and FPS for msi or a three point four three percent difference the founders edition card again at 1440p is at 77 fps which is actually noticeably slower than the AIB partner versions in fact it's actually fourteen point four six percent slower than MSI and eleven percent slower than EVGA and this result coincides with our original 1070 Fe overclocking results that showed that Mordor is sensitive to the clock rate increases Mordor at 4k shows the EVGA 1070 SC at 49 FPS with msi at 51 point 3 FPS and the FV card at forty point seven FPS are noticeably slower than both it's actually eighteen point five percent lead for EVGA over the FE card so that's a pretty noticeable jump almost twenty percent and is a reason why you would want the AIB partner card other than the thermal is the noise and the price if you need more reasons in terms of dx12 will just show ashes of singularity here which serves as one of the new API benchmark games on our test platform at 1080 high we see similar tearing as before MSI's 1070 marginally ahead of the EVGA 1070 SC and that's slightly ahead of the reference card between the msi 1070 and the reference 1070 there's a more noteworthy gap of 8.7 9% the msi 1017 EVGA 1070 are separated by only 3.8 percent between the two of them 4k high post similar results msi card runs at 49 point 4 FPS average in TX 12 with EVGA running at 47 point 7 5 FPS average the reference card finally sits at forty six point two seven so not a huge difference there between the three of them overclocking is one of the few differentiators of these AIB partner cards and EVGA s GTX 1070 se is effectively a reference design so it's got the same power face setup as this founded Edition card that is a four plus one phase power design for the vrm and it's also got the same power header here so it's just one eight pin as opposed to something like this msi 1070 which has an 8 pin and a 6 pin so considerably more power there about 75 watts extra total power budget whether that's tapped into of course depends on you other things but that's the theoretical power budget on that one as we've said before we use at real world applications to validate our overclock so as opposed to using something like just fur mark where you generate one very specific type of load and place it on the GPU and don't necessarily see failures until getting into games we do only games or fire strike or something real world and that means that our overclocked numbers are numbers that you should reasonably be able to achieve on your own device with general allowances for the silicon lottery so let's get into the stepping for the gtx 970 SC with EVGA gtx 1070 SC we were observing a maximum a core clock rate of eighteen forty seven megahertz with fluctuations ranging between these 1786 megahertz range and that peak point pushing v core further and of course doing some o scene gives us room but not a ton of room and we ended up with a twenty twenty five megahertz court clock that's with a fifty megahertz offset from the EVGA prio sea bass which is different from the founders edition which has a obviously plus zero megahertz prio see we also had a forty six oh eight two megahertz memory clock on e BGA's SC device and the power target maxes out at one hundred and twelve percent on this card with v core maxing out at one point zero seven five volts clearly this is an Nvidia the BIOS limiter for safety let's switch over to our founders Edition card charts so you can see how this one steps up on the FE card and this is from our Fe review when it first launched we were able to hit the very same forty six to eight megahertz memory clock so that makes sense since they're basically the same hardware but we had a slightly lower nineteen eighty seven megahertz core clock not that much lower though some of that difference can be chalked up to the silicon Madhuri and some of it can be attributed to just superior cooling on the EVGA card which is helping us stabilize the clock rate as you pit it against time and look at the charts that way msi on the other hand they go a bit hard so here's the look at their stepping the msi gtx 1070 we've got that the gaming ex is pushing twenty seventy five point five megahertz core and forty seven ninety-nine megahertz memory that's an extra 50 megahertz or so on the core that we're getting with an additional 200 megahertz memory overclock MSI's using a custom PCB it's taller and it has a ten plus one phase power design and an extra six pin power a header for another 75 watts of power budget both of these do contribute to the additional clock rate gain over the EVGA 1070 SC card despite using a custom v bios though from what MSI told us anyway the card is still stuck at a one point zero seven five volts v core and that is something we validated the bit that MSI told us is that they have a custom V bios and that it should allow for some extra over voltage but not really seeing that here so we are seeing the same 1.0 75 volt max for each of these devices and the 1070 founders Edition card as for performance results with overclocking here's a look at the FPS metrics now generally we're seeing gaps of a few percentage points one point eight ish to three point five percent on average with only a few clock sensitive tests showing anything more than that that's pretty expected for this type of OC though as the cards are already relatively close to their limit and you'll only see actual gains in OC clock sensitive applications and there are a few games that do that and in some production applications so is this EVGA card worth it well the 1070 SC falls mostly where the 1070 reference card falls in terms of frame rate metrics your main differences are outside of fps which makes sense because there's a lot more to these things than FPS thermals are critical often under discussed and that is one of the places where the SC card does outperform the 1070 EFI handily and to that end with the EVGA 10 sony SC again we were hitting forty six point eight nine Celsius load delta T versus fifty three point eight six Celsius for the reference design that's an improvement and it's at a 100 megahertz additional clock rate boost over what you get stock on the FE card MSI does outperform EVGA particularly with overclocking but the outperformance is really not that much in gaming terms now the thermals MSI does pretty darn well with their thermals and most of that can be chalked up to this right here you'll see the 1070 SC is pretty much completely obfuscated that's because this card is much bigger it's got bigger fans nearing 100 millimeters and a larger block of aluminum and copper to help cool the things so that's where you are seeing most of that performance difference with the thermals noise the noise levels of all these things well of these two things I should say are pretty similar as you've seen in our noise charts and that really brings us down to two things which is price and availability the thing is as we've said now the 1080 and 1070 today as of this video are pretty hard to get a hold of especially at their actual reasonable prices a lot of retailers are gouging right now as they're doing for the rx for any pre-orders and that's not something you want to fall into the trap of because it's not worth it so the range for these cards is supposed to be a latest down because it keeps falling the price range is supposed to be 380 to 450 we're not seeing that right now this card is priced at 440 you can find this particular gaming X from MSI at forge 60 and then you can find the gaming non X which has a lower clock rate for and a more similar vrm phase design to this card you can find that one for 440 as well either way $440 this this card is good this card's also good but I wouldn't spend 440 today I would certainly not by the founders Edition card when you've got these two options on the table literally in this instance but they're just it's still a little too expensive for my tastes I think as these fall closer to the 400 to 420 mark that would be where I would be more of a buyer for one of these cards and that's not to say that extra $20 is unfair or gouging but it just it feels a little higher than it should be strictly because Nvidia did advertise that price Flores $380 so I would hand out a little bit let the stock and the inventory hit the shelves let it replenish itself as these retailers are able to get stock and meet the supply and demand without crazy fluctuations that they're seeing right now you will see these prices stabilize a bit there'll be rebates things like that free games whatever and that will all help with the value proposition but as a video card the 1070 se is good the a CX 3.0 cooler is substantially improved over this if you don't want to blow our fan this is a good option it's got the LEDs if you like those I don't normally talk about aesthetics but you can figure that out on your own overclocking is okay it's not anything to get excited about this has better overclocking it might be more fun you're not going to see performance difference that's really noteworthy but you will see extra clock rate increases that you won't get on this card by nature of the improved vrm phasing and more power and things like that so that should pretty much sum it up if you're trying to spend less this is the way to go hopefully it falls from 440 but otherwise I'd hang out for probably three to six weeks in that range you'll see more of these Pascal chips hitting the shelves and after then the 480 will be launched anyway so there'll be some pressure to bring these prices down to what they should be based on the initial unveil so that's all I got for you this time overall that's it no no real strong positive or negative either way it just depends on what you're looking for in the price patreon link post raw video if you want to help us out link the description below for more information and thanks for watching I'll see you all next time you