Review: MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Titanium

Thanks for review Hilbert! Appreciate the fact you're opening the card(s) completely for reviews so that we could see everything on PCB, I know how it can be time consuming, keep up the good work

Another one 1070Ti card with Micron memory chips so no OC on memory above 9000, 1070Ti cards are really "crying" for faster memory chips. Would like to know if Micron GDDR5 memory chips for 1070Ti were NVidia's deliberate choice for AIBs (so that OCed 1070Ti GDDR5 can't match OCed 1080 GDDRX5) or AIBs simply choose Micron chips because other more OCable memory like Samsung or Hynix are not available in enough quantities.

 

Great review HH, and I too have to say I love to see the card without the cooler. That's interesting to many people, thanks for showing!

 

Yep, it's a shame to left some things dressed up completely without peeking under the hood ever. Best fun is naked fun!

On a serious note all of my PC hardware in past 20+ years was disassembled completely eiter upon purchase or few years later after warranty period ended, either for thermal compound and/or thermal pads change, to upgrade some things (switching to higher quallity capacitors, better cooling...) or just for fun. I did it with my toys as a kid and still doing it with these IT "toys", motorcycles.... just can' resist

 

load 81C, auch!


edit: ah that's stock crap cooler.. nvm lol


For small comparison sake @ Rise of TombRader, I get 123-126fps @1080p, factory OC 1418mhz boost.
I saw no 1070GTX came close to that when OC'ed, they made a funny bottleneck with these 1070's.

DeusEX MD 93fps @1080p

F1 2017 123fps @ 1080p

 

I've got a GTX 1070 with Micron VRAM and I was able to overclock it to 9140Mhz and it's rock solid - this was after flashing an updated BIOS to 'fix' the Micron overclocking issue. So, I'm assuming these GTX 1070ti would also have a BIOS that circumvents the issue. The issue was that the VRAM voltages weren't ramping up fast enough for the Micron cards, something about the new vBIOS's cured that issue.

 

Really doubt that's the reall "issue" here, both NVidia and AIB's are well aware of previous GTX 1070 issues with Micron memory chips and it's been fixed months ago with BIOS updates, no way they would make the same mistake twice. Most likely these GDDR5 Micron memory chips used on 1070Ti cards certified for 8Gbps aren't OCable more than 9000 and that's it.

 

That's what I'm saying though, I've got Micron and it made 9140Mhz, I don't think Micron VRAM is really an issue anymore in terms of overclocking (you said they don't go over 9000Mhz). I don't see why the Micron VRAM in GTX 1070ti would be any worse specification than the Micron stuff on my GTX 1070 - of course not all samples are guaranteed to get to 9000Mhz & beyond, but that's just silicon lottery.

 

As you just said, most of the times OC (and buying cards too) is nothing more than silicon lottery, guess you just won one OCing those Micron chips from stock 8000 to 9140 . But reading all these 1070Ti reviews with every single 1070Ti card bundled with Micron memory chips ending between 8700 and 9000 on memory OC makes me wonder if this "memory OC limit" was done on purpose (by NVidia of course) to stop 1070Ti cards to be even faster and compete with OCed GTX 1080 cards. Don't know how much these Micron chips can gain with small voltage bump, but guess it's not a smart thing to do and it can end up really bad if Micron chips already pushed to their limit get even more "nitro". No doubt 1070Ti with 9500 to 10.000 OC capable memory chips would be fast almost the the same as OCed 1080 and NVidia wouldn't like that.

At least all folks interested in purchasing 1070Ti know what thay're going to get: Micron. I really hate when I read review of some graphics card bundled with Samsung or Hynix chips OCing really well on memory, few months later I decide to purchase same card and when it finally comes it's bundled either with Elpida or Micron chips and memory OC is not even close to same press release cards reviewed with Samsung or Hynix chips OCing from 15% to 20% on memory, but my Elpida or Micron chips are going up to 10% at max and mostly between 400-500MHz to 600MHz over the stock frequency and that's it. It happened more than few times in past 3 or 4 years, either I ended up with Elpida or with Micron Well guess I can't win them all...

 

Nice looking card. I like the slimness.

 

Yeah, I see pretty big performance jumps by OC'ing the VRAM on my GTX 1070, if I remember correctly I got the same performance increase from OC'ing the VRAM as I did from the OC on the core. OC'ing the VRAM of the GTX 1070ti would provide even greater benefits than what I have seen with my card because the bandwidth is even more of a bottleneck with GTX 1070ti, so I think you're right that a highly VRAM OC'd GTX 1070ti would really narrow the gap even more with the GTX 1080. Will be interesting to see in forums how users get on with their GTX 1070ti VRAM overclocking - would be good to get a further sense of how good or poor VRAM OC overhead is.

 

tbh I could have lived without the naked sexyness. But once I started to get into water cooling, and buying my own block to put it on, reviews with pictures of the PCB are really interesting.
And those extreme clockers here like cowie and others (I as a noob am not aware of) can find one or the other interesting detail on a naked PCB too, like power delivery etc.

 

Just checked TPU and all 1070Ti cards they've tested ended up between 8960 and 9240 on memory OC and funny fact is that stock 1070Ti FE ended up with highest memory OC. Now really weird thing is that all 1070Ti cards so far are using EXACTLY the same chips from Micron: 7QA47 D9TCB ...Can't remember if I ever saw both NVidia for their stock models (or AMD/ATI doesn't matter) and every single AIB manufacurer for their custom made models are using the same memory chips on EVERY SINGLE card with same GPU. Just a coincidence - I don't think so....

Enough of this crap, hope someone is going to push those Micron chips to their limit with custom/modded BIOS running some latency and/or voltage tweaks on memory and then we're going to find out how close are these 1070Ti puppies to OCed 1080 cards.

 

Here, I've fixed that for you

Once you see them naked you just can't get enough of it, believe me.

Cards of course, what else

 

Cool, so there is not such a bad spread of VRAM overclocks right there! What/Where is TPU, I've not heard of it before?

 

Spoiler

TechPowerUp

 

Ha, thanks, I even go to that site for downloading GPUz, but never really took notice of it for anything else, and didn't realise they did reviews - will bookmark now as part of my regular browsing pattern! Their max overclocks very similar to my Micron memory max, that's not far off GTX 1080 bandwidth (the 10Gbps version), but again the GTX 1080 has the luxury of then being able to overclock that VRAM blasting past these GTX 1070ti's.

 

Of course, what else

 

I visit TPU only because of new versions of GPU-Z, very nice GPU BIOS database and sometimes because of detailed pics of bare GPU PCBs. For quite a while Hilbert is doing some really nice job taking detailed pics of completely naked GPU PCBs, memory chips, voltage regulators... and I really like that, so far those G3D review pics got everything I need to know and no need for me to visit TPU so often, maybe once or twice a month. G3D FTW!