EVGA's GTX 1070 SC introduces the company's ACX 3.0 air cooler, an update we detailed in our Computex coverage of EVGA's GTX 1080 FTW, Hybrid, and Classified cards. The 1070 SC is part of EVGA's “SuperClocked” family, which is the most affordable pre-overclocked card that the company sells. The vertical will likely later add an SSC card, or Super SuperClocked, with non-OC cards falling below SC in price. The GTX 1070 SC has an MSRP of $440, or $10 below the $450 Founders Edition that we reviewed, and is one of EVGA's first 1070s to market.
This review of the EVGA GTX 1070 SC looks at thermals, FPS, noise, and overclocking. We compare the EVGA 1070 SC vs. the MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X and NVIDIA GTX 1070 Founders Edition cards.
GTX 1070 & Pascal Architecture Content
To catch-up on the GTX 1080 & GTX 1070:
EVGA GTX 1070 SC Overclocking [Video Review]
NVIDIA GTX 1070 Specs
| NVIDIA Pascal vs. Maxwell Specs Comparison | ||||||
| Tesla P100 | GTX 1080 | GTX 1070 | GTX 980 Ti | GTX 980 | GTX 970 | |
| GPU | GP100 Cut-Down Pascal | GP104-400 Pascal | GP104-200 Pascal | GM200 Maxwell | GM204 Maxwell | GM204 |
| Transistor Count | 15.3B | 7.2B | 7.2B | 8B | 5.2B | 5.2B |
| Fab Process | 16nm FinFET | 16nm FinFET | 16nm FinFET | 28nm | 28nm | 28nm |
| CUDA Cores | 3584 | 2560 | 1920 | 2816 | 2048 | 1664 |
| GPCs | 6 | 4 | 3 | 6 | 4 | 4 |
| SMs | 56 | 20 | 15 | 22 | 16 | 13 |
| TPCs | 28 TPCs | 20 TPCs | 15 | - | - | - |
| TMUs | 224 | 160 | 120 | 176 | 128 | 104 |
| ROPs | 96 (?) | 64 | 64 | 96 | 64 | 56 |
| Core Clock | 1328MHz | 1607MHz | 1506MHz | 1000MHz | 1126MHz | 1050MHz |
| Boost Clock | 1480MHz | 1733MHz | 1683MHz | 1075MHz | 1216MHz | 1178MHz |
| FP32 TFLOPs | 10.6TFLOPs | 9TFLOPs | 6.5TFLOPs | 5.63TFLOPs | 5TFLOPs | 3.9TFLOPs |
| Memory Type | HBM2 | GDDR5X | GDDR5 | GDDR5 | GDDR5 | GDDR5 |
| Memory Capacity | 16GB | 8GB | 8GB | 6GB | 4GB | 4GB |
| Memory Clock | ? | 10Gbps GDDR5X | 4006MHz | 7Gbps GDDR5 | 7Gbps GDDR5 | 7Gbps |
| Memory Interface | 4096-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 384-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | ? | 320.32GB/s | 256GB/s | 336GB/s | 224GB/s | 224GB/s |
| TDP | 300W | 180W | 150W | 250W | 165W | 148W |
| Power Connectors | ? | 1x 8-pin | 1x 8-pin | 1x 8-pin 1x 6-pin |
2x 6-pin | 2x 6-pin |
| Release Date | 4Q16-1Q17 | 5/27/2016 | 6/10/2016 | 6/01/2015 | 9/18/2014 | 9/19/2014 |
| Release Price | TBD (Several thousand) |
Reference: $700 MSRP: $600 |
Reference: $450 MSRP: $380 |
$650 | $550 | $330 |
EVGA GTX 1070 SC Specs
EVGA's GTX 1070 SC is one of the more affordable cards in the company's stack. The “SC” cards (or “SuperClocked”) are hierarchically tiered lower than SSC and FTW cards, with only a few flagship GPUs receiving Classified or K|NGP|N cards.
This is an SC card. Its clock-rate is natively configured to 1594MHz / 1784MHz (base/boost), which is increased roughly 100MHz over the GTX 1070 Reference (“Founders Edition”) clock-rate of 1506MHz / 1683MHz. EVGA's shipping its 1070 SC with an effective memory clock of 8008MHz – the same as the GTX 1070. All GTX 1070 video cards will use GDDR5 memory, not the GDDR5X (“G5X”) debuted on the GTX 1080.
Dimensionally, the EVGA GTX 1070 SC is more workable than some of MSI's newest video cards, like the MSI 1080 Gaming X we just reviewed (and the MSI 1070 Gaming X, which uses the same size PCB). EVGA's SC card runs the same height as the expansion slot – ~4.376”, or 111.15mm – and uses exactly two expansion slots. There is no “2.5” slot setup, here. Its 10.5” length is fully saturated with fans and an aluminum heatsink.
New coolers accompany nearly every generational jaunt. EVGA's longest-standing cooling solution falls under the “ACX” brand name (“Active Cooling Xtreme”). The company updated to ACX 3.0 with the Pascal launch, something we detailed with great specificity in our Computex 2016 coverage of EVGA.
The ACX 3.0 cooler has been updated in a few ways which EVGA claims to be critical to its performance gains. Of note, the fan blades in the ACX 3.0 fans are now marginally thicker than on ACX 2.0. Theoretically, this reduces noise levels by reducing turbulence between the blades, thereby reducing vibration and its resulting 'whirr.' The fans use double-ball bearings, which is somewhat common in these coolers.
Like most vendors, EVGA's ACX cooler also spins down to 0RPM when the card is under limited power draw or thermal demand (through a built-in fan curve). This means the card generates effectively 0dB when under idle loads or lightweight gaming loads, e.g. DOTA2.
ACX 3.0 also makes changes to heatpipes. Unlike MSI, who have resorted to squared heatpipes toward the coldplate, EVGA is sticking with rounded heatpipes that have a “filling” in the corners between the heatpipe and heatsink. When we asked if that filling is copper, we were told “something like that, yeah.”
The two fans are mounted atop a somewhat standard aluminum finned heatsink. The heatsink then sits atop a baseplate, which uses thermal pads to cover the VRAM and MOSFETs/VRM components.
As far as visuals, EVGA's updated the face of its ACX graphics cards. ACX 3.0 is accompanied with LED backlighting for the meshed locations on the card. Some cards use RGB LEDs, but the SC sticks with white LED backlights.
Continue to Page 2 for test methodology.
