Usually, when dealing with ‘mini’ video cards any ideas on overclocking have to be severely tempered. The fact is in order to make a small form-factor video card a lot of compromises have to be made on the cooling front. There is simply not that much room for a beefy heatsink and multiple fans. Without these basic building blocks usually overclocking endeavors quickly hit a brick wall in the temperature department.
The Zotac GeForce GTX 1070Ti Mini is not your typical mini card. This card may indeed still be somewhat limited in cooling compared to massive vide cards – e.g. 3 fan models – but that is not the same as saying it is lacking in the cooling department either. In testing this card’s version of the IceStorm custom cooling solution proved to be more than up to the task of keeping a heavily overclocked GeForce GTX 1070Ti core temperatures in the realm of reasonable.
Now with that said there are certain things you will have to be aware of when overclocking this mini card. Firstly, is noise. Expect the noise levels to be higher than typical sized video cards. While yes, the fans’ themselves are typical sized (90mm and 100mm) the heatsink underneath it is smaller. This in turn limits the amount of heat it can handle at any given time. It is eons better than a typical mini sized card, but that is not the same as saying it is eons better than the typical sized video card. In testing temperatures were usually 5 or so degrees Celsius higher than say an EVGA SuperClocked design. To counteract this you will need to keep core voltages a tad lower than with typical cards… or put up with higher core temps. That may sound disappointing but it fantastic when you consider the difference in size between these two cards. This really is the first air based ‘mini’ card we have seen that can actually provide decent overclocking performance.
Equally impressive is Zotac obviously does more binning of their NVIDIA GeForce cores as our retail sample’s core was better than any core we have seen inside a SuperClocked 1070Ti card. The end result is that even with higher temperatures this core hit 1980 and stayed there 24/7 even when being continuously stressed. The same holds true of the RAM as hitting 9288 was a breeze. That is a bloody impressive combination from a mini card. The other issue is of course fan noise. The fans will have to spin in the 80 percent range in order to keep the card from turning into an ez-bake oven. That is a touch higher than we would like to see, but still amazing for such a small card.
To put all this into a nice and tidy small package, Zotac may indeed have pushed the boundaries (and arguably then some) in what can be classified as a ‘mini’ form-factor but the results do speak for themselves. Go into overclocking these little beasts with higher standards than any mini card has any right to be judged… and you will not be disappointed. This is because small does not mean poor overclocking when it comes to this little beast from the east. Color us impressed.
