We are fairly confident that Nvidia is readying a GeForce GTX 1070 Ti graphics card that slip into its product lineup between the non-Ti variant and the higher-end GeForce GTX 1080. However, if you are hoping to squeeze out GTX 1080-like performance through overclocking, you might be in for a rude awakening—the latest rumors suggest Nvidia is locking the frequency on the GTX 1070 Ti.
Bearing in mind that none of this is official, the rumor traces back to two sources, and the reports are slightly conflicting. Eteknix says it heard from an “industry insider” that the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti will not support overclocking in any way, shape, or form. “In addition, we’ve been informed that Nvidia will not release any reference cards and all AIB (add-in-board) partner cards will be locked to the same speeds. However, price and aesthetics are expected to differ across partner cards,” Eteknix says.
Expreview is reporting similar news, but according to a Google translation of the Chinese-language website, Nvidia is only restricting its hardware partners from cranking up clockspeeds at the factory, with the base clock fixed at 1,607MHz and boost clock set at 1,683MHz. The site suggests that “manual overclocking” will still be possible, meaning that consumers will be able to take matters into their own hands.
Rumored specs point to the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti being close in performance to the GeForce GTX 1080. The 1080 has 2560 CUDA cores, while the 1070 Ti is rumored to have 2432 cores—so only one SMM disabled, compared to the five disabled SMs (1920 cores) on the current 1070. The 1070 Ti is said to have the same base clock as the 1080, with a slightly lower 1683MHz vs. the 1080’s 1733MHz boost clock.
That’s not a big difference, and assuming Nvidia allows manual overclocking, it shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve 1080 levels of performance. Which means it would make some sense for Nvidia to restrict its partners from offering factory overclocks that are ‘too high,’ but to date Nvidia hasn’t ever blocked end-user overclocking.
Whatever the truth may be, we shouldn’t have to wait long to find out—leaks and rumors to this point suggest the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti will be announced by the end of this month, with a suggested price of $429.