Conclusion

Conclusion

The GALAX, or KFA2 depending where you purchase it, GTX 1070 Ti HOF edition is a top range product. It really is seriously good on all fronts. It remains to be silent, obviously performs as well as the other cards but what absolutely amazed me were the temperatures. When gaming you will be hovering in a 56 Degrees C domain, and that is very impressive. 

Let's face it though, the default performance is roughly the same on all these cards, as the AIB partners have not been allowed to tweak the product. GALAX does bypass that partially by "Hyper Boost OC" mode, however, you need to run their software at all times to activate that. As per policy, we test the performance of the card as it is set at BIOS levels, not at software solutions. I did, however, include some results to get you an idea of what these cards are capable when not restricted by NVIDIA. When AMD launched Radeon RX Vega 56 and 64, the one product where Nvidia did not really have a direct answer for was that Vega 56. That's why they figured, hmm it's almost Christmas season, let's make sure we have that product covered. And so the new baby Jesus Ti was born. To do so they took the GP104, reconfigured it a bit and then realized they needed to slow it down as it can quite easily match the GTX 1080. This is mainly the reason why you will see the AIB partners all offering their 1070 Ti cards at the same clock frequencies, as a faster product would cannibalize the GTX 1080.

Guess what? Grab the latest GALAX/KFA software or AfterBurner (updated for the 1070 Ti) and tweak the fracker until that smile on your face is bigger than the length of a GTX 1080 Founder Edition :) Really, things are that simple as all board partners will offer product with more cooling then is good for the 1070 Ti. As always, the performance on all models including tweaking results is all more or less the same due to the restrictions Nvidia applies. If the cooler is good enough, throttling will not occur. Hence differentiation in design, noise levels, and cooling is key and king to the board partners. The looks are very as usual and the card has a limited thus okay LED implementation and then there are the extra features like the number of display connectors. Let me reiterate that due to all Nvidia limitations the differences in performance in-between all 1070 Ti models is negligible to NIL in a 1 or 2 FPS margin. The problem with the highest-end SKUs is that they are more expensive, and that extra money just does not justify the little performance gain. The problem for the 1070 Ti, however, is that it is going to sit in a saturated segment, as i believe that people that wanted Pascal, would already have purchased a 1070 or 1080. 

Aesthetics

It is a very nice looking card. There's little more to say really. I like the design and, sure, the LEDs. All the extra RGB LED functionality like an RGB LED strip connector for me is not needed, hey - haters will hate, lovers will love it. Switch it on/off or to any color and animation you prefer, the choice is yours. Cool dibs is that back-plate, with openings in some areas (GPU/VRM) for venting. I'd like to see more vents though. As you can see, I remain skeptical about back-plates, they can potentially trap heat and thus warm up the PCB. But the flip-side is that they do look better and can protect your PCB and components from damage and, well, they can look nice so they have an aesthetic appeal as well. Consumer demand is always decisive, and you guys clearly like graphics cards with back-plates.

Cooling & Noise Levels

The reference design (Founders Edition) of the GTX 1070 Ti is set at an offset threshold of 80 degrees C and quite easily hit 84 Degrees C under load/stress. As such, the reference card, once that GPU gets warmer, will clock down on voltage and that dynamic turbo clock to try and keep the card at that temperature threshold. That's throttling and it's part of the design and falls within advertised turbo frequencies. The GTX 1070 Ti HOF runs very low at the fantastic 56 Degrees C marker, and with the temperature threshold set at 80 Degrees C, it has no need to throttle whatsoever. That means on long multi-hour gaming streaks, your card will still perform 100% at that ~1900 MHz marker. As mentioned expect (low) sound pressure values in the 38~39 dBA range at max under load and warm circumstances. We merely heard a minuscule amount of coil noises/whine at high FPS, you do not hear it inside a closed chassis. Weirdly enough we seem to hear it with all 1080 Ti cards we have tested to date. You have been able to check the thermal images, no comments here either, this is a seriously properly cooled card!

Power Consumption

Any GP104 Pascal GPU and thus GP104 based graphics card is rated as having a 180 Watt TDP under full stress, our measurements show it to be in the 170 Watt range. At this level you are looking at a card that consumes roughly 400~450 Watts for a stressed PC (in total), that is fine. We think a 500~600 Watt PSU would be very sufficient and, if you go with 2-way SLI, a 750 Watt power supply is recommended. It's definitely more than needed but remember - when purchasing a PSU, aim to double up in Wattage as your PSU is most efficient when it is under 50% load. Here, again, keep in mind we measure peak power consumption, the average power consumption is a good notch lower depending on GPU utilization. Also, if you plan to overclock the CPU/memory and/or GPU with added voltage, please do purchase a power supply with enough reserve. People often underestimate it, but if you tweak all three aforementioned variables, you can easily add 150 Watts to your peak power consumption budget as increasing voltages and clocks increase your power consumption.

Gaming Performance

If you game at a resolution of 1920x1080 (Full HD) up-to 2560x1440 (WQHD) then the 1070 Ti series is going to be very sufficient. The card does sit in a nice high-end (but not enthusiast) range that will suit many of you just fine. If you stick to the aforementioned resolutions then there's not one game that won't run really good combined with the best image quality settings. Gaming you must do with a nice 24" monitor of course, at 2560x1440/1600 would actually be a perfect fit. The 8 Gb graphics memory is excellent, making the product more future proof. Starting with Pascal the primary focus for Nvidia in terms of multi-GPU setups is that they will support 2-way SLI, but really that's it and all. 

Overclocking

Due to the many limiters and hardware protections, Nvidia has built in, all and any cards will hover roughly at or just over the 2.0 GHz level on the Boost marker. Now, the one factor that can actually positively influence the boost speed a little is temperature as the GPU will then throttle less. And that did show as we could boost to 2,050~2,100 MHz, that is stable. On 3DMark Firestrike with this card tweaked (for example) it may hover at ~2,075 MHz, while in Rise of the Tomb Raider (2016) you will be closer to 2.1 GHz. The reality is that Nvidia monitors and adapts to hardware specific loads, e.g. an application that is nearly viral like on the GPU will have the effect of the GPU protecting itself by lowering clocks and voltages. The opposite applies here as well, if a game does not try to fry that GPU, it'll clock a bit faster within the tweaked thresholds at your disposal. 

Concluding

While the HOF editions serve a very specific demographic, we think the GTX 1070 Ti HOF edition is a bit of an amazing product. You can argue looks, but purely speaking from a hardware point of view it simply rocks. It is silent yet offers tremendous cooling performance. It is a terrific card with just one problem, the 1070 Ti product positioning all by itself. Nvidia did what it needed to do, create an answer towards the Vega 56, really that's all that this product is about aside to create a new SKU for the 2017 winter season. The problem, however, is that most people already will have bought a 1070 or 1080, and is seen from that perspective I doubt that the Ti would be appealing to them. Also, the ones that will need a graphics upgrade probably will go with the cheaper SKU, the GTX 1070. The ones that can spend more money probably will sit it out and wait on Volta or whatever refresh Nvidia is going to release. In that mindset, the 1070 Ti remains to be a bit of a weird release that fills a gap just to match the Vega 56. The fact remains though, the GTX 1070 Ti series is however for up-to 2560x1440 gaming. In relative performance, the Ti offers good performance and you will gain from a nice manual overclock, but so will that regular 1070, of course. GALAX/KFA2 offers a seriously nice product here with an excellent cooler all themed in the white HOF style. It's really silent, cools great and offers performance and tweaking levels on the GPU that are really good. If you are in the market for a 1070 Ti and need something bright 'n white inside that PC case of yours, heck totally recommended, for sure.

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