I managed to sell my 980 a while back, and was "surviving" on a 750ti for a while. My 4K G-Sync monitor was begging me to play something other than League of Legends.
Eventually, under reasonable circumstances within budget, I purchased two MSI GTX 1070 cards for SLI. I can only say that I am very, very well pleased, and absolutely impressed. Despite not having a HB SLI bridge, I was able to successfully increase scaling with two Flex - and eventually two rigid - SLI bridges. Now, I can't say that I've compared single to dual card setups, but I know that compared to my 980, I can play nearly all AAA titles maxed out at 4K 60FPS. There are some exceptions for games that don't naturally support SLI, like the new DOOM, but even with a single card it manages to hit the high 50s and occasional 60FPS. This is still acceptable where G-Sync comes in to play - I don't feel a stutter. Some games I can even force AFR2 in the Nvidia Control Panel, and I can squeeze some more frames out it; again, with G-Sync in effect, I'm not noticing any major or noticeable stuttering/issues.
I've only had this set up in my test rig for a couple days as of the initial posting of this review, so I can't say much else. One 'snag' that I've run into with some EA titles, launched via EA Origin, is that they can only be run in Window/Borderless. Fullscreen seems to make the screen go black, so I've got to alt-tab and manually click in the game settings (or use a 3rd party program) to adjust the settings. Even with an expected performance hit in this mode, I don't get anything less than 60FPS, maxed out. Battlefront in 4K 60FPS is such a beautiful thing, that I don't mind the little hassle (and a happy tear rolls down from my eye). In the future, I expect a driver update to fix this issue: other games, like SC2, where the games appear to be natively borderless, there isn't an issue. I'm trying to test and see which of these games are giving me problems, but the problem goes away as soon as I force borderless via in-game settings or via 3rd party software. It mainly might be SLI-ready titles, but I haven't had enough time with the cards to figure that out yet.
As mentioned, I am running this in a test rig - open frame, with no practical air pressure, so the fans seem to be working a little extra hard to draw in air. With the two cards "sandwiched" together, GPU1 (top card) occasionally hits 85C, with GPU2 (bottom card) sitting comfortably at 65C during full load. Some games it is lower than that; have not seen anything higher than that in EVGA Precision X. It does get a tad bit loud, but I suspect that once I have this in a proper case and add the appropriate fans in the ideal locations for airflow, this issue will be reduced. I also plan to remove the lower portion of the backplate of GPU2 (which I've seen is purely aesthetic) to allow more air to reach GPU1.
These beauties are not even overclocked yet.
But I'm already very happy with the performance.
Should I have waited for the AIB board partners for a lower MSRP? Maybe. I've always like the rear-exhaust styled, slick-appearance of the reference designs; now known as the Founder's Edition. In my SFF mATX setup, I figure I need them to expel hot air out of the case rather than dump hot air within the case. Either way, I am thrilled with my purchase.
Lastly, which I feel is a huge bonus, is that I've noticed consistently that with Precision X's profiles active, the card will boost past its advertised/rated boost clock, right out of the box. TO BE FAIR: I've set EVGA Precision X to set Power Target max and Temp Target max, with priority pointed to Power Target. With a fan profile that somewhat prioritizes lower noise over heat, I am reading 1835Mhz on BOTH cards in most SLI-Ready games. Granted, boost clock will boost as high as it can within a reasonable limit as long as temperatures are under control, but this is still pretty sweet. I'm getting a nice +135Mhz over the advertised 1683Mhz without having to do anything, even at 85C for GPU1.
I'll update this post when I've got it in my main build, with the appropriate airflow configuration, possibly with overclock results... and with the latter portion of the backplate on GPU2 removed for GPU1 temp testing.
| Max Screen Resolution | 3840 x 2160 |
|---|---|
| Memory Speed | 1797 MHz |
| Graphics Coprocessor | gddr5 |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Card Description | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 with 8GB GDDR5 memory |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 8192 MB |
