Assuming that you do not have an unlimited budget when doing a GPU upgrade and for most of us who does? When it comes to video cards the age-old problem of performance vs price is always at the forefront of (most) people’s minds. No one likes wasting money on a video card they will never get the most from, and no one likes buying a card to only later realize it is not powerful enough to do what you want it to do.
On the surface this is really not all that hard of a problem to solve. Pick your budget, then pick the model series that is in your budget and call it a day. For those who like wasting money this indeed does work. It works so well that for most people they may never even realize they wasted money and picked the wrong card. This is where sites like us come in as we not only show what you can actually expect from a specific model we help you think outside the box and show what a card can really do. This way maybe you can save a bit of money, step down a model number and still get the performance you need.
In the past we have shown readers many great examples of what can be found in various price ranges – with everything from $200 to ‘money is no object’ asking prices. Today we are going to show why choosing a NVIDIA GTX 1070 over a GTX 1080 not only makes sense but actually makes a whole lot of sense. To be precise we are going to be testing the ASUS GTX 1070 STRIX 08G-Gaming video card.
This particular video card comes factory overclocked with memory settings of 8008Mhz(effective), a stock frequency of 1657 and a turbo boost of 1860. When compared with a ‘reference 1070’ these settings offer a pretty darn good performance boost, but ASUS did not stop there. Instead they have included a custom cooling solution that quite honestly is the best in the industry right now. What ASUS calls their ‘DirectCU III’ design, we call a huge heatsink that is cooled by not one, not two, but three high performance ‘Wing-Blade’ fans. This combination means that not only can the adventurous overclocker gain even more performance – and as we will show you it is significant – but the ‘factory settings’ are a mere suggestion. In testing this card will indeed boost way beyond what the paper specifications can do and stay there for darn near forever as this cooling solution is just that good.
We don’t want to spoil the ending but after testing this card it is the one we chose to buy ourselves instead of a NVIDIA GTX 1080. As we know that spending $460 (USD) for a single video card may sound outlandish to some – especially those whose budgets can only stretch to $350 (AKA GTX 1060 6GB territory), we are also going to show how you can make justifying this card down right easy… as you will be making it pay for itself in mere months. Yes we are going to show you why you can consider the asking price of this card a mere loan and why it will quickly pay for itself and then pay you nice dividends over its lifetime. Sounds tempting doesn’t it? So with that teaser laid out at your feet lets first show you what the STRIX 1070 08G is and how you can make it work for you.
