Zotac GeForce GTX 1070 Ti AMP Extreme Edition

VERDICT

Another 4K-friendly graphics card, but it’s competing –not always favourably –with its Nvidia stablemates

- James Archer

THE GEFORCE GTX 10-series of graphics cards may be well over a year old, but that hasn’t stopped Nvidia from adding to it with newer releases. First, we had the ludicrously expensive, top-of-the-range GTX 1080 Ti, and now there’s something a bit more within reach for the money-conscious: the GTX 1070 Ti.

In the 10-series hierarchy, itsits between the GTX 1070 and the GTX 1080, so is very much ahigh-end proposition. Despite the name, however, this card seems to have more in common with the GTX 1080: its processor count of 2,432 CUDA cores, for instance, isa mere 128 lower than that of the more premium card. The GTX 1070 and GTX 1070 Ti share 8GB of GDDR5 memory as opposed to the GTX 1080’s higher-performance GDDR5X. On paper, itlooks like Nvidia wants something significantly faster than the GTX 1070, in order to see off the challenge from AMD’s Radeon Vega RX 56 (Shopper 359).

STOPPED CLOCKS

This makes it particularly odd, then, that Nvidia has essentially prohibited partner card manufacturers from making the GTX 1070 Ti even better via factory overclocking, almost as if it’s afraid of such models becoming so powerful that it starts to encroach on the GTX 1080’s territory. The GPU isn’t locked down per se, but you can’t buy aGTX 1070 Ti that comes pre-overclocked out of the box.