Gigabyte AORUS GTX 1070 Review

Life is a series of tradeoffs. There is no ‘perfect answer’ and before purchasing any video card you have to decide what is most important to you. We think this is a pretty darn good card that is packed with value but it – just any other card we can think of – its not going to be right for everyone. Packed with value is not the same as saying it’s a ‘no-brainer’. So, let’s break it down on who this card is right for and who should take a hard pass.

Do you want a quiet card or a compact one? Thanks to its double ball bearing fans that are actually configured in such a way to reduce wind noise the Gigabyte AORUS GeForce GTX 1070 is awfully darn quiet. It is however oversized in all three dimensions. Small PC case users should be thinking more along the lines of the Zotac GTX 1070 Mini rather than any ‘big & tall’ card. For everyone else, of these three oversized dimensions the thickness of the card is going to be the stickiest of them all. If your motherboard does not space the two main PCIe x16 slots apart by three slots and you are interested in using either a lot of PCIe cards (e.g. NVMe Add In Cards) or more than one video card this card may not be right for you. Most will not care about this issue, as few use all that many PCIe cards and fewer still care about SLI these days.

Moving on. Do you care about overclocking and low card temperatures? If you do the combination of a heatsink that is nearly 2 slots thick all on its own with three highly advanced double ball bearing 100mm fans is awfully tempting. At stock clocks this card will auto-boost its core frequencies into the stratosphere… and stay there as this cooling solution is overbuilt for a 150-watt TDP class card (it basically is a 1080 class custom cooling solution). The combination of 10+2 phase power delivery sub-system that is built to the same standards as Gigabyte builds/built their Titan X class of cards also means that no matter how hard you push the little GP104-200 core it will never really stress this power delivery system enough for it to even notice the load. This really is a card that will make you wish NVIDIA had allowed their AIB partners the luxury of not artificially limiting the top end of manual overclocking ‘limits’.

Lastly, do you care more about cost or performance in general? If you are never going to go above 1080P resolutions and don’t have a 144Hz (or higher) monitor all this extra performance is almost going to be wasted. We really don’t believe in ‘future proofing’ and rarely recommend buying based on future possible performance needs. Buy what you need now and for the foreseeable future. So if you will not be able to take advantage of all this extra level of performance – performance that is in many cases darn near GTX 1070Ti levels – then the extra price over say a EVGA SuperClocked GTX 1070 may not be money well spent. Yes, this is easily one of the least expensive high performance GTX 1070s you can find. Yes, it is quiet and cool running… but forty (EVGA SC 1070) to sixty (1070 F.E.) bucks is forty to sixty bucks. That is getting into ‘noticeable impact on budget’ territory. It is however only forty bucks… as we would not recommend a Founders Edition card to anyone at any time.

Basically, for most people who can accommodate the dimensions of this card should be thinking long and hard about it. Its combination of low noise with high performance at a price this good is almost impossible to beat. So much so we consider this card to be in the top two to three of 1070 class cards available today… especially when looking at second-hand options as this card does not hold value as well as EVGA or MSI. That is a shame, but can make for some amazing deals to be had if you know what you are looking for. In the future we will go over the other options but this card really does deserve to be on your short, short list if you are thinking about a ‘tide me over’ card until RTX prices become sensible and start reflecting their actual real-world performance abilities – and not their future potential performance.