As stated in the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080Ti SC BE a certain amount of lowered expectations have to be taken into consideration and this goes double for the EVGA GeForce GTX 1070Ti SC BE. First and foremost, the entire class of 1070Ti’s are not precisely bleeding edge beasts. They are fairly high performance models – compared to say a non-Ti 1070 – but these are cut down NVIDIA cores meant more for the value orientated end of the spectrum than the ‘performance at any price’ crowd. Next the SuperClocked series is not EVGA’s ‘high end’ series. That is the For The Win series.
This combination though is precisely why the EVGA GeForce GTX 1070Ti SC BE is being highlighted in this review and not its FTW2 brother that also graces our charts. This card is expected to be a mediocre overclocker. It is expected to be out and out trounced by the EVGA GeForce GTX 1070Ti FTW2 and its ICX custom cooling solution.
The reality is a lot more nuanced than that. Yes this card will not clock as high as the ICX based FTW2. It will however make the specifications seem laughable conservative – and put the ‘plus’ in the ‘1683+’ specifications. This is because the ACX dual fan cooling solution is more than up to the task of pushing this card to its limits. So much so that the lack of a secondary 6-pin connector is going to be the real limitation. You are going to want to make sure that your PSU is up to snuff and capable of pushing all 150 watts of power over a single cable. You will want to make double damn sure that if you are mining that the adapter is not SATA based as it can, does and will pull 75 watts from this ‘PCIe slot’.
By the same token the differences are not as great as you would think. Yes the EVGA FTW2 variant of the 1070Ti class will hit 2030Mhz, while the EVGA GeForce GTX 1070Ti SC BE will ‘only’ hit 1976Mhz. However, that is still only 54 MHz in the difference. When you combine this with RAM ICs capable of hitting 9200Mhz (compared to 9400 for the FTW2) the real world difference is not all that great. So much so that at lower resolutions we would easily take this card over a reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080. We highly doubt you will ever find this card going for the same as reference 1080 and that to us makes this card a very good deal at stock and an excellent one when overclocked. After all, overclocking this card is pretty darn simple and unless you are trying for every last MHz simply cranking the dial in EVGA PrecisionX to ‘11’ will get you into the ballpark, and to get the rest you just have to start tweaking the amount of extra core voltage.
Of course, and just like the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080Ti SC BE, the largest real-world difference between this card and its FTW2 brethren is in the noise department. This card is noticeably louder than the FTW2 and that is what you will – once again – have to trade off against a lower asking price. Neither card is what we would consider ‘loud’ but the EVGA GeForce GTX 1070Ti SC BE is noticeable when pushed to the ragged edge… whereas the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080Ti FTW2 is darn near silent. So if you are concerned over the noise profile our your video card… this may not be an optimal choice. That however is the only thing the average buyer should be concerned over.
