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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Dr. Swag - Wednesday, January 31, 2018 - link
Oh cool! Anandtech finally reviews some aftermarket gpus!If only we could actually, you know, buy them.
sharath.naik - Wednesday, January 31, 2018 - link
Whats with the gpu prices?!! I had bought 1080 ti for 660$ 8 months back, today its 1400$+, when trying to get a second one.Hereiam2005 - Wednesday, January 31, 2018 - link
I bought mine last week for 750$. Its a shitty 1080ti, the gigabyte gaming oc version, but it is much cheaper than other models.Dr. Swag - Wednesday, January 31, 2018 - link
Miners.JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, January 31, 2018 - link
Supply/Demand.People are pointing the finger at miners, but it's more than just an alternative coin mining issue. AIB partners are hesitant to make more cards because the last time GPU mining was big, GPU AIBs mostly sought to meet bigger supply to the bigger demand, only to get burned three-ways.
1) Bitcoin market crashed. This led to GPU demand faltering quickly.
2) They had already made their quarterly order to AMD/nVidia and were stuck with excess GPUs which they couldn't sell due to:
a) Miner card resale market providing cheaper cards to those at lower price brackets.
b) Lack of miner demand which the increased supply was supposed to meet.
c) New GPU architecture releasing the next quarter, while they were still stuck on lots of old GPUs.
3) Excess of warranty claims for excess GPU supply to miners.
AIB partners would be willing to increase their quarterly orders so as to increase GPU supply to meet increased demand (due to miners) if they could _assume_ stability in the demand, which fundamentally means assuming stability in the crypto market, but stability in the crypto market is a complete and utter joke, so they're not willing to increase supply especially if next-gen GPUs might be around the corner if AMD/nVidia have an announcement by next quarter (GTX1100 series, RX600 series, etc.)
JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, January 31, 2018 - link
Also, GPU pricing is also being affected by 3rd party sellers wanting to take advantage of the mining demand. 3rd party marketplace sellers on Amazon marketplace, Newegg marketplace, and eBay are also scalping excess GPU stock not to mine, but just to resell to gamers willing to fork over the money, but particularly to miners which can still recoup on the purchase, but will face a longer return on investment.Don't buy from 3rd party marketplace scalpers, they're just as guilty as miners (if not moreso, as they have no intent to even open the GPUs to use them for themselves) for draining supply from 1st party sellers, which prevents folk like you from getting rational prices.
Just wait for next gen cards, maybe. AIBs won't be shy to ramp up production of the newest stuff that miners and gamers will be sure to buy and can guarantee they won't be sitting on outdated stock.
Pinn - Wednesday, January 31, 2018 - link
Nvidia has volta, but AMD has nothing next-gen for awhile.VulkanMan - Wednesday, January 31, 2018 - link
AMD has Navi.CiccioB - Thursday, February 1, 2018 - link
Coming in 2019FreckledTrout - Wednesday, February 7, 2018 - link
AMD have Vega on 7nm coming this year. I wouldn't brush the move to 7nm off either is it should allow the GCN architecture to breath by hitting much higher clocks. Of course the proof is in the pudding but I expect the 7nm shrink to be a decent performance bump.