NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Shoot-Out: ASUS Strix And Zotac AMP Extreme
Now for the really fun stuff. All of this custom cooling technology and the triple-fan arrays are for more than just good looks and style points. So, lets overclock these puppies and see what they can do.
To overclock the custom Asus and Zotac cards featured here, we altered their frequency offset and power / temperature targets, but left voltages alone. First we cranked up the power target to 140% (120% on the ASUS Strix) and also kicked up the temperature target to 92 degrees. Then we bumped up the GPU and memory clocks until we had instability or saw visual anomalies on-screen.We ended up with a +165MHz offset to the GPU Core Clock and a +500 offset to the memory clock. This, along with the power target increase, brought us to a peak GPU clock of 2,050 MHz on the Zotac card and 2,063 MHz on the ASUS Strix. Memory clock speeds shot up to 4,606 MHz and 4,498 MHz on the Zotac and ASUS cards, respectively.
With a similar boost to both their core and memory clocks, each card scaled very well. The lesson here, isn't about which card is faster, because it's a really tight race and the deltas essentially fall within the margin of error for the benchmarks. It's about how easy it is to increase performance with some quick tweaks with these cards.
The max temperature reached on each card was right around 62-degrees C when using our highest OC settings.
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Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a couple of final data points -- namely, power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea of how much power each configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.
The custom Asus and Zotac cards we tested consumed similar amounts of power. The Asus Strix came in slightly lower under both idle and load conditions, but the deltas separating the cards is only a few watts.
We should also note that each card is whisper silent when idle, since their fans spin down completely when load and temperatures are low. Some noise can be heard during intense gaming sessions when the fans kick up a bit. But the output is only noticeable when listening for it and definitely can't be heard when gaming and wearing a simple pair of headphones. However, both of the cards sound like a 747 gearing up for take-off when their triple fans are manually cranked up to their maximum speeds, but this won't ever happen during normal game play or even when mildly overclocking.
