How to Overclock the GTX 1070 

Overclocking has changed with Pascal. It's gotten more advanced – but not more complex. The core functions of overclocking remain the same; we're still using manual stepping and sliders to achieve high, sustained overclocks, but a new auto OC tool (currently only with EVGA Precision) makes limit finding easier. In theory, anyway.

Our OC methodology uses manual stepping. We increment the clock-rate and other settings as the card continues to exhibit stability, stopping only once artifacting or driver crashes appear. At that point, we tweak various other settings (power allowance, vCore, memory clock). You can find all that stepping below.

EVGA GTX 1070 SC Overclocking Results 

The below table shows our stepped overclock progression attempts when using the EVGA GTX 1070 SC:

We used EVGA's newest Precision X iteration for overclocking. Voltage was choking our OC at earlier stages in the process, so we eventually increased voltage to its maximum limit on the card – 1.075V. The clock-rate stabilized at ~2025MHz after making this change, with the memory clock pushing 4608MHz (+600MHz offset). EVGA's GTX 1070 SC has a power limit of 112% and uses a single 6-pin power connector, pointing toward a lower theoretical max OC limit than what MSI's dual-header card offers.

2025MHz core / 4608MHz memory is a pretty strong OC for reference power design. The Founders Edition card, plotted further down, output 1987MHz core and 4608MHz memory – so that's the same memory OC, but a slight (~2%) increase in clock-rate.

MSI GTX 1070 SC Overclocking Results

Here's a table with the MSI 1070 OC progression:

MSI goes hard with overclocking. The MSI GTX 1070 we've got is pushing 2075.5MHz core and 4799MHz memory. That's an extra 50MHz or so on the core that we're getting, with an additional 200MHz memory overclock. MSI's using a custom PCB with a 10+1-phase power design and an extra 6-pin power header, both of which contribute to this gain. Despite using a custom VBIOS, the card is still stuck at 1.075V vCore.

GTX 1070 Founders Edition Overclocking Results

And here's a look at our GTX 1070 Founders Edition results (from here):

On our FE card, we were able to hit the very same 4608MHz memory clock as on the EVGA 1070 SC – which makes sense, since they're basically the same hardware. FE has a slightly lower 1987MHz core clock. Some of that difference can be chalked-up to silicon lottery, some of it can be attributed to the superior cooler on the EVGA card that's helping to stabilize clock-rate over time.

EVGA GTX 1070 SC Overclocked FPS Benchmarks

Results charts below:

FPS results show differences of a couple percentage points in most games (1.8% - 5%, or thereabouts), but some games are more sensitive to clock-rate changes and exhibit greater gains as a result. Shadow of Mordor is one of those games.