The EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti FTW2 Review: iCX Brings the Lights and Sensors

Overclocking

Ultimately, the EVGA GTX 1070 Ti FTW2 is being pushed as an overclocking card, like the reference Founders Edition. The importance is clear for custom boards that may only run at reference clocks. To note, while NVIDIA does support overclocking, they have limited actual overvolting, and instead providing the ability to unlock 1-2 more boost bins and associated voltage points. In Precision XOC, this features as the percent voltage boost slider.

Precision XOC is already needed to fully utilize all iCX features, and by using it we were able to gauge the ‘software overclocking’ angle of the GTX 1070 Ti FTW2. In concrete numbers, running the Short Test resulted in offsets around +80 to +115MHz to the core clock, while running the Long Test resulted in a voltage curve with a maximum offset of +125MHz. The Long Tests occasionally crashed the ScannerX window, requiring user intervention to move on. One of the Short Tests applied a +114MHz offset, which we benchmarked. As neither OC test changes the power and temperature limits, the pseudo-overvoltage percentage boost, or even the maximum tested offset of +150MHz, we also benchmarked a manual overclock of +200MHz core and +200MHz memory offsets, with 120% power limit, 83 degree temperature target, and maximum voltage boost.

Even that configuration does not represent the fullest mainstream overclocking capabilities of the GTX 1070 Ti FTW2. The maximum 235W power draw can only be accessed with a 130% power limit setting, something that is not available under the standard (master) BIOS. In any case, without knowing beforehand about EVGA Double BIOS on Pascal cards, it’s likely that a user will not understand that the maximum 235W power draw specification needs to be enabled.

In the case of the GTX 1070 Ti FTW2, toggling to the secondary (slave) BIOS raises the power limit to 130%, raises the temperature target to 93 degrees, applies a more aggressive fan curve, and disables zero fan speed idle. As EVGA notes, the Pascal architecture will reduce clockspeeds once the GPU core temperature reaches 60 degrees, so for the maximum mainstream overclock a very aggressive fan curve should be applied. For the curious, we were able to reach past 2100MHz by using the slave BIOS.

As always with overclocking, individual GPU dies behave differently and a sample size of one is not representative of all models. Nevertheless, the performance increases are in line to what we saw with overclocking the GTX 1070 Ti Founders Edition. The capability to perform at the level of a GTX 1080 definitely exists. And as a case study of EVGA’s new-ish single-step overclocking solution, we can see that Precision XOC applies a mild overclock that can be accomplished without relatively riskier changes to power/temperature limit or voltage boost. This carries through to the power, temperature, and noise aspects, which are equally as tame as the Short Test overclock.

That being said, our XOC Scanner auto-overclocks act better as a selling point than a perceptible performance increase; in our results, framerates increased by an average of 2%. Now, it is true that a good amount of factory overclocked graphics card have only token clockspeed increases, if only just to say that it’s overclocked, something that is not possible for the GTX 1070 Ti series. Even if higher software-enabled clockspeeds are advertised, the software itself is more-or-less optional. Whereas, independent from overclocking, the GTX 1070 Ti FTW2 iCX needs Precision XOC to truly – and literally, for that matter – shine. So in that sense XOC Scanner nonetheless provides the GTX 1070 Ti FTW2 iCX the closest thing to a common factory-esque overclock than its peers.