Palit has long proved popular with the budget conscious gamer and we take their GTX 1070 Game Rock for a spin.
Palit GTX1070 Game Rock Review
Palit GTX1070 Game Rock Review
- Thread starter tinytomlogan
- Start date
Palit has long proved popular with the budget conscious gamer and we take their GTX 1070 Game Rock for a spin.
Palit GTX1070 Game Rock Review
Looking at this exact card so i can retire my GTX 960 & 950 from folding duties.
Less power & more PPD for Team 98860
Whether or not i click buy today is another matter
I wish the F@H bench was better tbh, Ive tried it on the cards here but it doesnt even really stress them that hard. If they make it more consistent and stressful then Ill add it as a feature to our reviews
SOA_RRU
Member
I've noticed that even on the 960 & 950 they will only use 75% max power vs 100% all the time from a 660Ti etc
As long as they produce the ppd they can run at 75% all day but it does make you wonder if they were fully stressed what sort of performance / ppd increase would we actually see?
As long as they produce the ppd they can run at 75% all day but it does make you wonder if they were fully stressed what sort of performance / ppd increase would we actually see?
Scoob
New member
I bought one of these a while back, mainly because it was the cheapest available by a fair margin at the time, it's a further £15 cheaper today at £380.
It's an interesting card, boosts VERY aggressively out of the box, runs cool and near inaudible when being pushed, though it's rather large, dwarfing the 680 it replaced.
The only down-side, if you view it as such, is that ramping up vCore and Power Limit doesn't really allow much additional over clocking - at least not for me. The clocks appear to be initially limited by vCore (mine sits at 1.05v under load) which can be increased to 1.095v using Afterburner. Oddly, Voltage slider has to be set to +100% to get this minimal increase, small increments of 5-10% do nothing. The "Total Power" also appears to have an overly low artificial limit set of just 114% - adjusting this alone will get you the best OC you'll see, irrespective of playing with vCore or leaving it alone.
This card is technically over-spec'd vs. the Founders Edition and many other cards, with both a very good cooler as well as extra power phases, yet it fails to achieve clocks over 1995.5mhz for me with any stability, due to power limitations. So, those extra phases seem wasted at this time, with "inferior" (power-wise) products clocking higher.
I suspect this card will come into its own once we start seeing custom BIOS's and/or BIOS tweaking tools. For now however, it's a great GPU out of the box, but artificial restrictions prevent it over clocking as well as one might hope.
Btw: I'm aware GPU Boost 3.0 is a little different from what came before, giving a fairly aggressive "free" overclock if temps etc. remain good. However, I'm convinced it'll have more headroom available with an unlocked Power Limit via a BIOS tweak. It does seem odd to me that such an over-spec'd GPU would have a 114% power limit, which feels a little on the low side.
Anyway, more than happy with this card, it's only running at 1920x1200 currently, but if you ramp up the fidelity even this low resolution can work it hard.
Note: I'm running a 2600k @ 4.4ghz - so, pretty old - however, the 1070 is in no way "bottlenecked" (hate that phrase, so often miss-used) in the handful of titles I regularly play - it's not once been limited due to the CPU being overly taxed.
Scoob.
It's an interesting card, boosts VERY aggressively out of the box, runs cool and near inaudible when being pushed, though it's rather large, dwarfing the 680 it replaced.
The only down-side, if you view it as such, is that ramping up vCore and Power Limit doesn't really allow much additional over clocking - at least not for me. The clocks appear to be initially limited by vCore (mine sits at 1.05v under load) which can be increased to 1.095v using Afterburner. Oddly, Voltage slider has to be set to +100% to get this minimal increase, small increments of 5-10% do nothing. The "Total Power" also appears to have an overly low artificial limit set of just 114% - adjusting this alone will get you the best OC you'll see, irrespective of playing with vCore or leaving it alone.
This card is technically over-spec'd vs. the Founders Edition and many other cards, with both a very good cooler as well as extra power phases, yet it fails to achieve clocks over 1995.5mhz for me with any stability, due to power limitations. So, those extra phases seem wasted at this time, with "inferior" (power-wise) products clocking higher.
I suspect this card will come into its own once we start seeing custom BIOS's and/or BIOS tweaking tools. For now however, it's a great GPU out of the box, but artificial restrictions prevent it over clocking as well as one might hope.
Btw: I'm aware GPU Boost 3.0 is a little different from what came before, giving a fairly aggressive "free" overclock if temps etc. remain good. However, I'm convinced it'll have more headroom available with an unlocked Power Limit via a BIOS tweak. It does seem odd to me that such an over-spec'd GPU would have a 114% power limit, which feels a little on the low side.
Anyway, more than happy with this card, it's only running at 1920x1200 currently, but if you ramp up the fidelity even this low resolution can work it hard.
Note: I'm running a 2600k @ 4.4ghz - so, pretty old - however, the 1070 is in no way "bottlenecked" (hate that phrase, so often miss-used) in the handful of titles I regularly play - it's not once been limited due to the CPU being overly taxed.
Scoob.
It wont allow any overclocking, thats what GPUboost3 is for. Most cards will run extremely cost to their max boost
Overclocking is a mute subject this generation, it doesnt need any more power, its not using everything its allowed in the first place.
Overclocking is a mute subject this generation, it doesnt need any more power, its not using everything its allowed in the first place.
Scoob
New member
Oh, I agree Tom, but it allows a little, though GPU Boost 3 does appear to push the card quite a long way. I've done a bit more reading on the subject, and while I consider under 70c under heavy load in a very hot room to be very good - and it is - my understanding is that keeping the temps under about 50c is where GPU Boost 3 can really go crazy. I do plan to go water cooled at some point once again, but not on this particular GPU...possibly a "1080Ti" in the future, we shall see.
So, in my experience with this GPU so far, here's what I've observed:
- The card can boost up to near its maximum* without any tweaks, but it doesn't sit there long, maybe a few seconds before dropping back.
- Giving the card it's max (default) power limit of 114% will see it hold higher boost levels more regularly.
- Applying +100mhz to core clock, along with 114% Power Limit, will see the card sit at it's max boost pretty much all the time, if GPU load warrants it.
* By "Maximum" I mean the max core clock I personally have observed this card being capable of.
GPU never went above 69c during any of these tests - I used Unigine Valley on loop - ambient temps were in the low to mid 30's. It's also important to state that this GPU consistently runs above the stated max boost level when under sufficient load.
Note: GPUz usually shows the clocks as being limited by "vRel" so voltage, however, raising the vCore appears to make zero clock speed difference, but GPUz then reports the clocks to be more "Pwr" limited, hence my thoughts on a custom BIOS being able to raise that limit.
Basically, GPU Boost 3 is great, and does a damn fine job of dynamically over clocking the GPU, leaving little or no room for further tweaks by the user. However, it is potentially restricted by certain hard-coded limits, such as the 114% power limit in the case of this particular card.
Chatting to a few people, some are having a degree of success flashing "OC edition" type BIOS's onto the standard variant of a given card. So, the hard coded limitations to GPU Boost 3 have been lifted in effect, giving a little extra headroom. I.e. the base/boost clocks are slightly higher of course, as is the headroom to push beyond them. In examples people have given, one GPU BIOS may have the power limit max set to 109%, whereas another has 120% Giving the former GPU the raised limit via BIOS flashing has seen improvements.
Anyway, to be clear, I'm well aware that GPU Boost 3 is pretty much doing as good a job as it's possible to do over clocking wise within certain hard-coded limits and this is great. Equally however, it is still fun to tinker, especially when a GPU is running as cool and quiet as this one.
So, in summary, with a few minor tweaks my 1070 now more consistently boosts to 1900+ mhz and holds these levels throughout a Unigine Valley run. In longer gaming sessions too, I do not see peak clock degradation over time with these tweaked settings. When/if more BIOS tweaking tools are available, I'll been keen to test my theories on Power Limits. After all, if going from 100% to a 114% limit improves my experience then being able to go to 120% may improve things more...though this is of course purely something I'll do for fun
Cheers,
Scoob.
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