ASUS STRIX GTX 1070 Review

Armed with the DirectCU III cooler, STRIX GTX 1070 (ROG STRIX-GTX1070-O8G-GAMING) offers up low-noise, low temperatures with the added bonus of a factory overclock.

Product on Review: ROG STRIX-GTX1070-O8G-GAMING
Manufacturer & Sponsor: ASUS
Street Price: £439.99 GBP / $450 USD

NVIDIA’s GTX 10 series launch can be marked out as one of their most enthralling yet – surprise, intrigue and excitement have all been pivotal factors in the release of the GTX 1060, 1070, and 1080. And while the aftershocks of such prominent unveilings can still be felt these many weeks after, the enthusiasm hasn’t died down. Today, we turn to ASUS for a detailed look at their STRIX GTX 1070.

Under observation today is the ASUS STRIX GTX 1070 – a graphics card which bears the renowned DirectCU III cooling system. This cooler, like the versions before it, seeks to bring down temperatures and do so while maintaining low-noise levels. Along with the cooler we also have some additional features which should help to separate this GTX 1070 from others – twin fan headers are situated at the end of the card and an additional HDMI 2.0 resides on the rear IO panel. On top of all this, ASUS has also modified the GPU clock speed and bumped it up by 10% in a bid to boost framerates and hopefully allow this card to take the spotlight by climbing up the performance charts.

ASUS on their STRIX 1070

ROG Strix GeForce® GTX 1070 gaming graphics cards are packed with exclusive ASUS technologies, including DirectCU III Technology with Patented Wing-Blade Fans for 30% cooler and 3X quieter performance, and Industry-only Auto-Extreme Technology for premium quality and the best reliability. Aura RGB Lighting enables a gaming system personalization and VR-friendly HDMI ports let gamers easily enjoy immersive virtual reality experiences. ROG Strix GeForce® GTX 1070 also has GPU Tweak II with XSplit Gamecaster that provides intuitive performance tweaking and instant gameplay streaming.

Technical Specifications

Below are the technical specifications supplied by ASUS:

Chipset
GeForce GTX 1070
Digital max resolution
7680×4320
Core Clock
Base: 1657MHz
Boost: 1860MHz
Memory Clock
8008MHz / 8.0 Gbps
Process Technology
16 nm
CUDA Cores
1920
Memory Size
8GB GDDR5
Memory Bus
256-bit
Card Bus
PCI-E 3.0
Memory Type
GDDR5
DirectX
12
[n]OpenGL
4.5
PCB Form
ATX
Multi-view
4
I/O
1x Dual-link DVI-I
2x HDMI 2.0
2x Display Port 1.4
Suggested Power requirement
500W (8-pin external power connector)
Card Size
298mm x 134mm

Packaging & Bundle

Since we’re dealing with the ASUS STRIX line, our graphics card comes packaged with the refreshed livery – a strong emphasis on RGB lighting via AURA is clearly evident. The front of the packaging lists some of the integral NVIDIA features while the reverse runs through some of the key features this card brings (all of which we’ll be covering in this article). Technical details and ports are also listed.

Inside, there is an inner box which contains the card and the accessories. The card is encased with some foam padding and there is a small assortment of bundled items. They are as follows:

• Driver/Software CD
• 2x fabric cable ties
• 1x Power Cables – Y-cable (8pin to dual 6-pin)
• Installation Guide
• World of Warships Promotional Card

Closer Look (With Cooler)

The basis for the STRIX 1070 is the now well-known DirectCU III cooling solution. Adopting a triple fan configuration, this cooler consumes the card. Later in the article we’ll analyse the different aspects of our cooler in plenty of detail.

Overall the design with the plastic shroud looks aggressive, appealing to the eye and will likely pair up with other hardware very well – especially since we can modify the LED lighting strips (seen around the cooling fans), using ASUS Aura software. Our only criticism is that we’re dealing with plastic here; a card carrying such a price-tag should be using more robust materials such as metal.

The actual size of this graphics card is: 29.8 x 13.4 x 4 cm, which is slightly bigger than the Founder’s edition which sits at: 26.67 x 11.11 x 4 cm.

Flipping the card over, on the reverse we have a large steel backplate which protects the components on our graphics card and also prevents it from flexing or bending. Having such a feature on a graphics card is encouraging as it provides rigidity and prevents potential damage. There are pockets of ventilation for significant components.

This backplate also features the ROG logo which acts as an LED – this lighting can be tweaked via the AURA software and changed to a colour of preference.

As seen on other DirectCU III coolers, the STRIX 1070 arrives with three WingBlade cooling fans which ASUS claim will deliver 30% better cooling and 3X quieter performance. During light load these cooling fans will cease to spin – rendering the card completely silent.

Running along the edge, ASUS has placed Republic of Gamers branding which also synchronizes with the LED lighting.

STRIX 1070 also has multi-SLI ports which allows us to pair up this card with more than one other graphics card. The GTX 1070 also has the added benefit of using SLI HB (High Bandwidth) meaning the bandwidth is now doubled from 1GB/s to 2GB/s.

The GTX 1070 arrives with an assortment of video out ports which include:

• 1x Dual Link DVI-D port (Up to 3K)
• 2x DisplayPort 1.4 (8K @ 60Hz)
• 2x HDMI 2.0 port (4K @ 60 Hz) (VR + display)

The inclusion of 2x HDMI over 3x DisplayPort + 1x HDMI means that users can still use one of the HDMI ports for display while using the other HDMI port for a VR headset.

The selection of ports here should entertain most users, it’s great to see DP 1.4 being used as this now supports up to 8K output and was only released a matter of months ago.

The Founder’s Edition of GTX 1070 requires a single 8pin PCI express connection and likewise, this STRIX edition also arrives with an 8pin connector – which comes as a surprise given the custom PCB, factory overclock, upgraded components and not to mention the RGB functionality.

Like other STRIX cards the 1070 has tiny LEDs next to the PCI express connections – these LEDs indicate whether the plug is connected properly. A white LED signifying a good connection while RED showing a problem.

At the end of the card there are two fan headers. The idea being – you can connect up cooling fans which are nearby for targeted cooling when the graphics card is under heavy load. Usually fans which are connected using the headers on the motherboard will factor in CPU temperatures – this nifty inclusion will help to drive down temperatures specifically when the GPU is being taxed.

Closer Look (Without Cooler)

We’ve reviewed quite a few graphics cards from ASUS which use the DirectCU and this third iteration of the well-known cooler doesn’t fail to impress.

The foundation for DirectCU III is a large heatsink comprising of aluminium fins and five copper heatpipes which make direct contact with the GPU. The heat is transferred away from the GPU, through the fins and the cooling fans help to dispel the remaining warmth.

With this cooler now detached from the graphics card we can see take a look at the inner-workings and what ASUS has designed.

All of the components across our board are employed using Auto Extreme – the process which sees the construction take on a fully automated process.

The driving force behind our GTX 1070 is the new GP104 which uses NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture. This GPU comprises of 7.2 million transistors created by the 16nm TSMIC process. ASUS has applied a factory overclock to this card which translates to a healthy 10% increase.

Our graphics card employs an 8+2 power design and there are Super Alloy Power II components used throughout the PCB.

Super Alloy Power II includes: SAP II CAPs, SAP II Chokes, SAP II DrMOS and SAP II POSCAPs. In return, by using these components we can expect longer lifespan, better efficiency and more headroom for overclocking.

So bearing all this in mind, we’re left in no doubt of this graphics card’s capabilities. Over the next series of pages we’ll be running this graphics card through our benchmarking suite.

Test Setup & Methodology

How we test graphics cards

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphics card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

Hardware

Taking Intel’s High-End Desktop platform, our hardware utilises the Intel X99 chipset. Combined with this we use the Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to a realistic and achievable 4GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB (4x4GB) of DDR4 at 2666MHz and a 750GB SSD there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

High End Graphics Cards on test:
ASUS STRIX GTX 1070 (NVIDIA 372.54)
GIGABYTE GTX 1060 G1 GAMING (NVIDIA 372.54)
GIGABYTE GTX 1070 G1 GAMING (NVIDIA 372.54)
GIGABYTE GTX 1080 G1 GAMING (NVIDIA 372.54)
PowerColor RED DEVIL RX 470(Crimson 16.8.1)
PowerColor RED DEVIL RX 480 (Crimson 16.7.2)
ZOTAC GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme (NVIDIA 368.81)
ASUS STRIX GTX 1080 (NVIDIA 368.81)
Gainward GTX 1070 Phoenix Golden Sample (NVIDIA 368.81)
MSI GTX 1060 Gaming X (NVIDIA 368.64)
Gainward GTX 1060 Phoenix Golden Sample (NVIDIA 368.64)
NVIDIA GTX 1060 (NVIDIA 368.64)
NVIDIA GTX 980Ti OC (NVIDIA 368.81)
NVIDIA GTX 980 (NVIDIA 368.81)
NVIDIA GTX 970 (NVIDIA 368.81)
AMD Radeon RX 480 CrossFire (Crimson 16.7.2)
AMD Radeon RX 480 (Crimson 16.7.2)
XFX R9 FURY (Crimson 16.7.2)
AMD Radeon R9 390X (Crimson 16.7.2)

Special thanks go to Intel, Corsair, MSI and AOC for providing the extreme spec components used for our test bench:

Motherboard: MSI X99S GAMING 9 AC
CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition @ 4GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair LPX Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 2666MHz 16-17-17-35 C1
Power Supply – CORSAIR HX1050
Hard Drive – Samsung 840 EVO 750GB
Cooler – CORSAIR Hydro Series™ H105 240mm Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
Monitor – AOC 28″ 4K U2879VF
Capture Card – Razer Ripjaw

Benchmarks
If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we’ve chosen:

DOOM (OpenGL 4.5 & Vulkan)
Total War: Warhammer
Rise of the Tomb Raider
HITMAN
DiRT Rally

To capture framerates we use a combination of in-game benchmark tools, FRAPS and PresentMon.

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included three of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:

Unigine: Valley
Unigine: Heaven 4
Futuremark 3DMark Firestrike
Futuremark 3DMark Time Spy

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Power, Temperatures, Acoustics

To test for power consumption, we take a measurement from the plug socket. It is important to note that the figures below represent total system power use and not just the GPU. The CPU was always in a fixed state (4GHz overclock) so did not affect the additional power load when the GPU was placed under 100% load using Heaven 4.0 which was ran for 20 minutes at which point a load reading was taken. Idle readings were taken 5 minutes after system boot to ensure any background services and applications had loaded.

Temperature

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests we set Heaven 4.0 running continuously for ~30 minutes recorded the peak/maximum GPU temperature.

Acoustics

Thanks to the low-noise cooling fans and ability for these fans to cease spinning during idle times – there is very little noise emitted from STRIX GTX 1070. Under load, all three fans generate little noise.

Overclocking

To overclock the STRIX GTX 1070 we used the MSI Afterburner Tool since it gives extensive options for modifying the GPU and memory clock.

Overclocking the card was easy and we managed to boost the GPU and memory clock beyond the factory overclock applied by ASUS. Our result took the GPU clock up to 1669MHz (1872MHz Boost) and modifying the memory clock up to 2102MHz. Pushing the card a little further meant we were able to receive a higher score in Unigine Heaven 4.0 which is shown below.

While the GPU clock only allowed a marginal increase it was encouraging to see the memory clock speed take 100MHz increase, this certainly helps with overall performance.

DX12: 3DMark Time Spy

With its pure DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, 3DMark Time Spy is the ideal benchmark for testing the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards.

DX11: 3DMark FireStrike

Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is Futuremark’s most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.

DX11: Unigine Heaven 4.0

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms.

DX11: Unigine Valley

Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.

DX12: DOOM OpenGL 4.5

By default DOOM utilises an OpenGL 4.5 renderer, and is one of relatively few Windows PC titles to not use DirectX 12. It tests how well NVIDIA and AMD’s GPUs deal with a less mainstream approach, especially in regards to driver optimisations, and like all of id titles stretches graphics quality to the limit.

DX12: DOOM Vulkan

id have also released an optional Vulkan rendering path for DOOM. This API is a development of AMD’s Mantle low level which has been taken on board by the Kronos Group for implementation as the next generation of Open graphics APIs. Like DirectX 12 Vulkan is capable of Asynchronous Compute in specific configurations.

DX12: Total War: WARHAMMER

Total War: WARHAMMER is a pseudo Real-Time Strategy title which leverages DirectX 12 to render huge numbers of complex units on screen at any one time.

DX12: Rise of the Tomb Raider

Square Enix’s Rise of the Tomb Raider is the sequel to 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot. An enormously challenging title graphically, the developers also released an optional DirectX 12 render path for Windows 10 users. Although it has undergone a number of iterations this rendering pathway notably doesn’t currently utilise the full capabilities of DirectX 12.

DX12: HITMAN

Yet another DirectX 12 title, 2016’s Hitman from Square Enix and developer IO Interactive has a more robust DirectX 12 implementation than Rise of the Tomb Raider. We’ve tested at a full range of resultions, from 1080p through to 4K, which provides a look at the impact of GPU speed and memory utilisation.

DX11: DiRT Rally

Overall Performance

Here we take a look at the overall performance of the graphics card. This figure is determined by finding the average FPS across all of the settings used in a particular benchmark(game) to give us an overall value.

Value For Money

We make a simple calculation for this set of results. For each game we add all of the resulting FPS totals together and then divide by the four sets to give us an overall performance figure. While the figures alone do not give you an accurate picture of how the card will perform in any given scenario, they do tell you, when averaged, which GPU is the more capable across all of the benchmarks and settings tested.

Conclusion

In the same way the STRIX GTX 1080 impressed us, the STRIX GTX 1070 is a delightful product. In essence, both cards are equipped with the same features, cooler and design and as such we’re pleased to report a positive experience.

From an aesthetics point of view the STRIX GTX 1070 is a stunning piece of kit. Although the cooler does bear a plastic design, the styling with its RGB LED functionality will look great as part of any computer system. True to its reputation the DirectCU cooler delivers on both thermal performance and low-noise – two factors which are likely to be of primary concern to those on the hunt for a GTX 1070 graphics card.

Pitting the STRIX 1070 against other previously reviewed cards reveals a strong candidate in the NVIDIA GTX 10 series lineup. The 10% factory overclock to the GPU definitely adds value to this offering; by pushing the framerates up where needed – we’d just have hoped for a factory overclock on the memory too. Thankfully in our endeavours to push the card further with a manual overclock demonstrated that we were able to nudge the memory clock up by at least 100MHz – which gave significant benefits to the overall performance.

Between the GTX 1070s on the market it could be said there is little to separate the custom designs with their high-performance coolers and generous warranties but ASUS has paid particular attention to supplementary features which aren’t just superficial. They actually make a difference. These features concern the twin fan headers found at the end of the card and the rather useful secondary HDMI 2.0 port for those wanting to engage in some VR gaming.

STRIX GTX 1070 is priced at £439.99 GBP / $450 USD – placing it as one of the more expensive 1070s currently gracing the market. The decision to choose this card over another will come via the additional features that other cards lack. Such things as the customisable RGB lighting, 0dB fans when the system is idle, twin fan headers, that additional HDMI 2.0 port and then the extended warranty which sees an ample 3-years warranty. Deciding whether these features are required is down to the individual’s needs but we can certainly see their worth.

STRIX GTX 1070 is an outstanding representation of what can be done with NVIDIA’s new GTX 1070. This card is armed with a diverse feature-set and a cooler which delivers on low-noise and low-temperatures – all of these factors should provide ASUS strong placement in a competitive market.

Pros
+ Attractive design
+ RGB LED lighting
+ Extra features – twin fan headers/second HDMI 2.0
+ Comes with factory overclock
+ Low-noise
+ Effective cooling
+ Overclocks beyond current
+ Great performance
+ DirectX 12 ready
+ 3-year warranty

Cons
– No factory memory overclock

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