The EVGA 1070 SC: A Worthwhile Investment?

When it comes to graphics cards, there are several options available on the market, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. In this article, we'll take a closer look at the EVGA 1070 SC, specifically how it compares to the reference design of the same card.

The main differences between the 1070 SC and the reference design are largely outside of frame rate metrics. While the SC card does offer improved cooling capabilities, thanks to its ACX 3.0 cooler, which features a larger block of aluminum and copper to help keep temperatures in check, this is not reflected in FPS performance. In fact, according to our testing, the SC card's thermal performance is significantly better than the reference design, with a delta T (temperature difference) of 46.8°C vs 53.86°C under heavy loads.

This improved cooling system allows for more aggressive overclocking, which can result in higher clock rates and potentially better performance in certain games. However, it's worth noting that the overclocking potential on the SC card is not dramatically different from the reference design, with most of the improvement coming from the improved thermal management.

One area where the EVGA 1070 SC does shine is in its noise levels. With a more substantial fan configuration and better cooling system, the SC card produces less noise than the reference design, making it a good choice for those who value quiet operation.

Price and Availability

As of our recording date, the EVGA 1070 SC is priced at $440, which is significantly higher than the Nvidia-suggested price floor of $380. This is largely due to retailer gouging, as the card has been in high demand since its release. However, we expect prices to stabilize over time as more stock hits the shelves and retailers adjust their pricing accordingly.

In the meantime, if you're looking for a budget-friendly option, the EVGA 1070 SC may not be the best choice. The reference design, on the other hand, is still available at a lower price point, making it a more accessible option for those who want to spend less.

Overclocking Potential

One area where the EVGA 1070 SC offers an advantage over the reference design is in its overclocking potential. With improved vrm (vertical module resistor) phasing and increased power delivery, the SC card can handle higher clock rates than the reference design. This means that if you're interested in pushing your system to its limits, the SC card may be a better choice.

However, it's worth noting that the overclocking potential on the SC card is not dramatically different from the reference design, and most of the improvement comes from the improved thermal management. If you're looking for a more extreme overclocking experience, there are other options available, such as the MSI Gaming X card, which may offer better performance.

Aesthetics

The EVGA 1070 SC also features some aesthetic upgrades over the reference design, including LED lighting and a more substantial fan configuration. While these design elements may not be of interest to everyone, they can make the card stand out in a build.

In conclusion, the EVGA 1070 SC is a solid choice for those looking for a graphics card with improved cooling capabilities and potentially better overclocking potential. However, its high price point makes it less accessible than the reference design, which may be a better option for budget-conscious buyers. We recommend waiting for prices to stabilize over time before making a purchase.

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Postol Video

If you'd like to see a video review of the EVGA 1070 SC, be sure to check out our post on [link]. In this video, we put the card through its paces and provide a detailed analysis of its performance, overclocking potential, and overall value.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enevga's GTX 1070 SC is priced at $440 making it sadly one of the most affordable GTX 1070s presently available but prices should come down a bit because the low end is still 380 MSRP we haven't seen that hit Market just yet though because as many of you have pointed out in comments the 1080 and 1070 are both very limited availability right now and that means that they're very expensive in the case of the 108 800 plus doar if you can find it at all still though these cards from what we've been told by EVGA should become available on mass probably in the next month or so July is their expected time range for actual availability of these cards in a greater quantity than they are now the card we're reviewing today is the GTX 1070 SC it is stock clocked 100 megaherz faster than the reference design which is this one and that puts evga's card at 7 1984 MHz core and it's also using the ACX 3.0 cooler which is the biggest change here as is often the case with aib partner cards because the reference design cooler although uh Nvidia claims premium materials and what have you is actually pretty poor at cooling the GPU itself as we've shown so we're reviewing this thing today we're going to be talking about its value overall FPS metrics noise thermals overclocking things like that as always Link in the description below for the article which has more charts than we'll be showing here and we'll hopefully give you some additional Insight EVGA superclocked cards are their most affordable tier of pre-overclocked GPU and this one sits about 100 MHz faster than reference the GTX 1070 SC takes two expansion slots and is a more normal 4.4 in height the same as the expansion slot height generally and makes it smaller than the GTX 1070 gaming X from MSI that we also tested ACX 3.0 uses a dual fan design each with two ball bearings rated for lawn service life against ACX 2.0 the ACX 3.0 design uses a marginally thicker fan blade to reduce turbulence of the blades thereby reducing vibration and rattle within the fan which should help control some of the noise overall and drop the worrying sound that we've heard in some previous models we'll test noise levels in a moment though like the twin frozer and stricks cards evga's ACX 3.0 spins down to zero RPM when under minimal load in terms of processing or thermals and that means it produces effectively zero noise until the fans spin back up ACX 3.0 also uses round heat pipes as evj has done in the past but adds a conductive filler between the Heat pipe and the heat sink this helps improve the service area for heat dissipation and spreading and is becoming more common as MSI with their twin frozer 6 card used square heat pipes when it connects with the cold plate so that's becoming a bit of a trend the heat sink on evga's SC card is mounted to to a base plate that contacts the vram and vrm components like mosfets with thermal pads in between the base plate and those components and is part of what makes up the ACX 3.0 cooler and is also what you'll find on the 1080 cards and other cards in the future as far as visuals ACX 3.0 gets a slight facelift versus the previous version of ACX which would be 2.0 and it now has led backlights also new the GTX 1070 SC uses white LED backlights but the FTW cards will have RGB backlighting controllable through EVGA software all right so that's the walkthrough now we're going to do thermal benchmarking first just to bring everyone up to speed we represent these numbers in delta T over ambient and that means we subtract ambient from the measured value there's a few good reasons for that I've discussed them before but very briefly the ambient temperature of a house environment even a thermal chamber fluctuates from second to Second and those can be several degrees in some cases so we sub track that to normalize the results and uh also when you're looking at the results for your own environment you'll want to add back in your own ambient temperature because it's not going to be the same as here so that's why we do that these are delta T which means you'll want to for this Environ add in about 20 to 22 celsius to get kind of our absolute value but just add in your own ambient temperature for a better idea the GTX 1070 reference card has a maximum temperature of 53.86 C Under full load measured with a 1683 MHz stock clock that's about 25% different from the MSI GTX 1070 with twin frozer 6 cooling landing at 41.77 celsi when in OC mode at 1797 MHz evga's GTX 1070 SC with ACX 3.0 cooler is 13.84% different from the Fe card and is at 46.8 n Celsius which puts MSI and the lead between the two but it's a much larger card so you have to keep that into account so here's a look at our noise data as you can see we test a few different ways first of all the noise print at the bottom is the footprint of noise in the room before our test we've got 100% test where the fans are configured to 100% speed that is both fans in these cases we've got 50% test where the fans both are running at 50% speed we have idle which in the case of the EVGA 1070s and the MSI 1070 gaming X means they're running at zero RPM so that is the noise of the system that'd be the PSU and the cooler the CPU Cooler in this case and then we've got the auto test which shows what you should expect under normal gaming circumstances without a custom vanan curve all right now we're going to move on to FPS benchmarking we only have a few games in this video but article in the description below if you want to see the full charts for all the games we tested GTA 5 shows almost identical performance between the EVGA and MSI GTX 1070 cards with the Fe card only marginally behind at 1080p with very high and ultra settings the EVGA 1070 SE runs at 1217 FPS average and 87.3 FPS 1% low which is identical to what the MSI card is outputting with its only 13 MHz speed difference the 0.1% lows are the only location where we see a difference and the MSI card is leading by a bit about 2 FPS or so at 4K similar results are netted MSI leading by 1 FPS average EVGA leading the 1070 Fe by about 1.5 PS so nothing exciting here but somewhat expected since we're really just comparing the same architecture GPU everything with different clock rates Black Ops 3 at 1080p it shows the GTX 1070 from MSI at 175 FPS average and the 1070 SC from EVGA at 171 FPS average with the MSI card sustaining generally higher 1% and 0.1% low values it's stable clock rate is some of this by the way that doesn't really mean that there's a noticeable difference at this this obscenely High frame rate but there is a measurable difference the founders Edition card sits at 166 FPS which is a difference of about 2.97% moving to 1440p we see the EVGA GTX 1070 SC and MSI 1070 gaming X are effectively tied with the MSI version of the card leading by 0.7 FPS again completely imperceptible to the user the cards are for all intents and purposes identical in performance at this setting with this game and against the ref 1070 there is a slight gain of 4.2% moving to the 1070 SC from EVGA but that's about all we get at 4K the EVGA GTX 1070 performs at 55 FPS average and sustains highly timed 1% and 0.1% lows at 43 and 40.7 FPS respectively these are superior to the fury X which looks fine and its averages but fails massively in the 0.1% low Department as a result of its limited vram capacity that creates noticeable stuttering and msi's GTX 1070 gaming X doesn't have this issue it runs at 57 FPS average and that's a gain of 3.57% over the EVGA card the reference card is at 53.3 FPS average and they're all pretty close at 4K mostly because it's such an abusive setting anyway Shadow of Mordor puts the EVGA GTX 1070 at 121.71a 1070 and about 1 FPS ahead of the reference 1070 1440p we see a gap marginally widening between the aftermarket cards and that puts them at 86 FPS for EVGA and 89 FPS for MSI or a 3.43% difference the founders Edition card again at 1440p is at 77 FPS which is actually noticeably slower than the aib partner versions in fact it's actually 14.46% slower than MSI and 11% slower than EVGA and this result coincides with our original 1070 Fe overclocking results that showed that Mordor is sensitive to the clock rate increases Mordor at 4K shows the EVGA 1070 SC at 49 FPS with MSI at 51.3 FPS and the Fe card at 40.7 FPS or noticeably slower than both it's actually 18.5% lead for EVGA over the Fe card so that's a pretty noticeable jump almost 20% and is a reason why you would want the a partner card other than The Thermals the noise and the price if you need more reasons in terms of dx2 12 we'll just show ashes of Singularity here which serves as one of the new API Benchmark games on our test platform at 1080 High we see similar tiering as before MSI 1070 marginally ahead of the EVGA 1070 SC and that's slightly ahead of the reference card between the MSI 1070 and the reference 1070 there's a more noteworthy gap of 8.79% the MSI 1070 and EVGA 1070 are separated by only 3.8% between the two of them 4K High post similar results MSI card runs at 49.84 FPS average in dx12 with EVGA running at 47.75 FPS average the reference card finally sits at 46.276720 plus one phase power design for the vrm and it's also got the same power header here so it's just 1 18 pin as opposed to something like this MSI 1070 which has an 8 pin and a six pin so considerably more power there about 75 Watts extra total power budget whether that's tapped into of course depends on a few other things but that's the theoretical power budget on that one now as we've said before we use real world applications to validate our overclock so as supposed to using something like just furmark where you generate one very specific type of load and place it on the GPU and don't necessarily see failures until getting into games we do only games or fire strike or something real world and that means that our overclock numbers are numbers that you should reasonably be able to achieve on your own device with General allowances for the Silicon lottery so let's get into the stepping for the GTX 1070 SC with evga's GTX 1070 SC we were observing a maximum core clock rate of 1847 MHz with fluctuations ranging between the 1786 MHz range and that Peak Point pushing V core further and of course doing some o gives us room but not a ton of room and we ended up with a 2025 MHz core clock that's with a 50 MHz offset from the EVGA pre OC base which is different from the founders Edition which has a obviously plus zero mehz procc we also had a 4608 MHz memory clock on evga's SC device and the power Target maxes out at 112% on this card with vcore maxing out at 1.75 volts clearly this is an Nidia V bios limiter for safety let's switch over to our Founders Edition card charts so you can see how this one steps up on the Fe card and this is from our Fe review when it first launched we were able to hit the very same 4608 MHz memory clock so that makes sense since they're basically the same Hardware but we had a slightly lower 1987 MHz core clock not that much lower though some of that difference can be chocked up to the Silicon Lottery and some of it can be attributed to just Superior cooling on the EVGA card which is helping us stabilize the clock rate as you pit It Against Time and look at the charts that way MSI on the other hand they go a bit hard so here's the look at their stepping the MSI GTX 1070 we've got that's the gaming X is pushing 2 75.5 MHz core and 4799 MHz memory that's an extra 50 MHz or so on the core that we're getting with an additional 200 MHz memory overclock MSI is using a custom PCB it's taller and it has a 10 plus one phase power design and an extra six pin power header for another 75 wats of power budget both of these do contribute to the additional clock rate gain over the EVGA 1070 SC card despite using a custom V bios though from what MSI told us anyway the card is still stuck at a 1.75 volt VC cor and that is something we validated the bit that MSI told us is that they have a custom V bios and that it should allow for some extra over voltage but we're not really seeing that here so we are seeing the same 1.75 volt Max for each of these devices and the 1070 Founders Edition card as for performance results with overclocking here's a look at the FPS metrics now generally we're seeing gaps of a few percentage points 1.8 is to 3.5% on average with only a few clock sensitive test showing anything more than that that's pretty expected for this type of OC though as the cards are already relatively close to their limit and you'll only see actual gains in OC clock sensitive applications and there are a few games that do that and in some production applications so is this EVGA card worth it well the 1070 SC falls mostly where the 1070 reference card Falls in terms of frame rate metrics your main differences are outside of FPS which makes sense cuz there's a lot more to these things than FPS thermals are critical often underd discussed and that is one of the places where the SC card does outperform the 1070 Fe handily and to that end with the EVGA 1070 SE again we were hitting 46.8 n Cel load delta T versus 53.86 C for the reference design that's an improvement and it's at a 100 MHz additional clock rate boost over what you get stock on the Fe card MSI does outperform EVGA particularly with overclocking but the outperformance is really not that much in gaming terms Now The Thermals MSI does pretty darn well with their thermals and most of that can be chocked up to this right here you'll see the 1070 SC is pretty much completely aisc that's cuz this card is much bigger it's got bigger fans nearing 100 mm and a larger block of aluminum and copper to help cool the thing so that's where you are seeing most of that performance difference with The Thermals noise the noise levels of all these things well of of these two things I should say are pretty similar as you've seen in our noise charts and that really brings us down to two things which is price and availability the thing is as we've said now the 1080 and 1070 today as of this video are pretty hard to get a hold of especially at their actual reasonable prices a lot of retailers are gouging right now as they're doing for the rx40 pre-orders and that's not something you want to fall into the Trap of because it's not worth it so the range for these cards is supposed to be I lay this down because it keeps falling uh the price range is supposed to be 380 to 450 we're not seeing that right now this card is priced at 440 you can find this particular gaming X from MSI at 460 and then you can find the gaming non X which has a lower clock rate for and a more similar vrm phase design to this card you can find that one for 440 as well uh either way $440 uh this this card is good this card is also good but uh I I wouldn't spend 440 today I would certainly not by the founders Edition card when you've got these two options on the table literally in this instance but they're just it it's still a little too expensive for my taste I think as these fall closer to the 400 to 420 Mark that would be where I would be more of a buyer for one of these cards and that's not to say the extra $20 is unfair or gouging but it it just it feels a little higher than it should be strictly because Nvidia did advertise that price floor as $380 so I would hang out a little bit let the stock in the inventory hit the shelves let it replenish itself as these retailers are able to get stock and meet the supply and demand without crazy fluctuations that they're seeing right now you will see these prices stabilize a bit there'll be rebates things like that free games whatever uh and that will all help with the value proposition but uh as a video card the 1070 SC is good the ACX 3.0 cooler is substantially improved over this if you don't want a blower fan this is a good option it's got the LEDs if you like those I don't normally talk about Aesthetics but you can figure that out on your own overclocking is okay it's not anything to get excited about this has better overclocking it might be more fun you're not going to see a performance difference that's really noteworthy but you will see extra clock rate increases that you won't get on this card by nature of the improved vrm phasing and more power and things like that so that should pretty much sum it up if you're trying to spend less this is the way to go hopefully it falls from 440 but otherwise I'd hang out for probably 3 to six weeks in that range you'll see more of these Pascal chips hitting shelves and after then the 480 will be launched anyway so there'll be some pressure to bring these prices down to what they should be based on the initial unveil so that's all I got for you this time overall that's it no no real strong positive or negative either way just depends on what you're looking for in the price patreon link the postol video if you want to help us out Link in the description below for more information and thanks for watching I'll see you all next time ohevga's GTX 1070 SC is priced at $440 making it sadly one of the most affordable GTX 1070s presently available but prices should come down a bit because the low end is still 380 MSRP we haven't seen that hit Market just yet though because as many of you have pointed out in comments the 1080 and 1070 are both very limited availability right now and that means that they're very expensive in the case of the 108 800 plus doar if you can find it at all still though these cards from what we've been told by EVGA should become available on mass probably in the next month or so July is their expected time range for actual availability of these cards in a greater quantity than they are now the card we're reviewing today is the GTX 1070 SC it is stock clocked 100 megaherz faster than the reference design which is this one and that puts evga's card at 7 1984 MHz core and it's also using the ACX 3.0 cooler which is the biggest change here as is often the case with aib partner cards because the reference design cooler although uh Nvidia claims premium materials and what have you is actually pretty poor at cooling the GPU itself as we've shown so we're reviewing this thing today we're going to be talking about its value overall FPS metrics noise thermals overclocking things like that as always Link in the description below for the article which has more charts than we'll be showing here and we'll hopefully give you some additional Insight EVGA superclocked cards are their most affordable tier of pre-overclocked GPU and this one sits about 100 MHz faster than reference the GTX 1070 SC takes two expansion slots and is a more normal 4.4 in height the same as the expansion slot height generally and makes it smaller than the GTX 1070 gaming X from MSI that we also tested ACX 3.0 uses a dual fan design each with two ball bearings rated for lawn service life against ACX 2.0 the ACX 3.0 design uses a marginally thicker fan blade to reduce turbulence of the blades thereby reducing vibration and rattle within the fan which should help control some of the noise overall and drop the worrying sound that we've heard in some previous models we'll test noise levels in a moment though like the twin frozer and stricks cards evga's ACX 3.0 spins down to zero RPM when under minimal load in terms of processing or thermals and that means it produces effectively zero noise until the fans spin back up ACX 3.0 also uses round heat pipes as evj has done in the past but adds a conductive filler between the Heat pipe and the heat sink this helps improve the service area for heat dissipation and spreading and is becoming more common as MSI with their twin frozer 6 card used square heat pipes when it connects with the cold plate so that's becoming a bit of a trend the heat sink on evga's SC card is mounted to to a base plate that contacts the vram and vrm components like mosfets with thermal pads in between the base plate and those components and is part of what makes up the ACX 3.0 cooler and is also what you'll find on the 1080 cards and other cards in the future as far as visuals ACX 3.0 gets a slight facelift versus the previous version of ACX which would be 2.0 and it now has led backlights also new the GTX 1070 SC uses white LED backlights but the FTW cards will have RGB backlighting controllable through EVGA software all right so that's the walkthrough now we're going to do thermal benchmarking first just to bring everyone up to speed we represent these numbers in delta T over ambient and that means we subtract ambient from the measured value there's a few good reasons for that I've discussed them before but very briefly the ambient temperature of a house environment even a thermal chamber fluctuates from second to Second and those can be several degrees in some cases so we sub track that to normalize the results and uh also when you're looking at the results for your own environment you'll want to add back in your own ambient temperature because it's not going to be the same as here so that's why we do that these are delta T which means you'll want to for this Environ add in about 20 to 22 celsius to get kind of our absolute value but just add in your own ambient temperature for a better idea the GTX 1070 reference card has a maximum temperature of 53.86 C Under full load measured with a 1683 MHz stock clock that's about 25% different from the MSI GTX 1070 with twin frozer 6 cooling landing at 41.77 celsi when in OC mode at 1797 MHz evga's GTX 1070 SC with ACX 3.0 cooler is 13.84% different from the Fe card and is at 46.8 n Celsius which puts MSI and the lead between the two but it's a much larger card so you have to keep that into account so here's a look at our noise data as you can see we test a few different ways first of all the noise print at the bottom is the footprint of noise in the room before our test we've got 100% test where the fans are configured to 100% speed that is both fans in these cases we've got 50% test where the fans both are running at 50% speed we have idle which in the case of the EVGA 1070s and the MSI 1070 gaming X means they're running at zero RPM so that is the noise of the system that'd be the PSU and the cooler the CPU Cooler in this case and then we've got the auto test which shows what you should expect under normal gaming circumstances without a custom vanan curve all right now we're going to move on to FPS benchmarking we only have a few games in this video but article in the description below if you want to see the full charts for all the games we tested GTA 5 shows almost identical performance between the EVGA and MSI GTX 1070 cards with the Fe card only marginally behind at 1080p with very high and ultra settings the EVGA 1070 SE runs at 1217 FPS average and 87.3 FPS 1% low which is identical to what the MSI card is outputting with its only 13 MHz speed difference the 0.1% lows are the only location where we see a difference and the MSI card is leading by a bit about 2 FPS or so at 4K similar results are netted MSI leading by 1 FPS average EVGA leading the 1070 Fe by about 1.5 PS so nothing exciting here but somewhat expected since we're really just comparing the same architecture GPU everything with different clock rates Black Ops 3 at 1080p it shows the GTX 1070 from MSI at 175 FPS average and the 1070 SC from EVGA at 171 FPS average with the MSI card sustaining generally higher 1% and 0.1% low values it's stable clock rate is some of this by the way that doesn't really mean that there's a noticeable difference at this this obscenely High frame rate but there is a measurable difference the founders Edition card sits at 166 FPS which is a difference of about 2.97% moving to 1440p we see the EVGA GTX 1070 SC and MSI 1070 gaming X are effectively tied with the MSI version of the card leading by 0.7 FPS again completely imperceptible to the user the cards are for all intents and purposes identical in performance at this setting with this game and against the ref 1070 there is a slight gain of 4.2% moving to the 1070 SC from EVGA but that's about all we get at 4K the EVGA GTX 1070 performs at 55 FPS average and sustains highly timed 1% and 0.1% lows at 43 and 40.7 FPS respectively these are superior to the fury X which looks fine and its averages but fails massively in the 0.1% low Department as a result of its limited vram capacity that creates noticeable stuttering and msi's GTX 1070 gaming X doesn't have this issue it runs at 57 FPS average and that's a gain of 3.57% over the EVGA card the reference card is at 53.3 FPS average and they're all pretty close at 4K mostly because it's such an abusive setting anyway Shadow of Mordor puts the EVGA GTX 1070 at 121.71a 1070 and about 1 FPS ahead of the reference 1070 1440p we see a gap marginally widening between the aftermarket cards and that puts them at 86 FPS for EVGA and 89 FPS for MSI or a 3.43% difference the founders Edition card again at 1440p is at 77 FPS which is actually noticeably slower than the aib partner versions in fact it's actually 14.46% slower than MSI and 11% slower than EVGA and this result coincides with our original 1070 Fe overclocking results that showed that Mordor is sensitive to the clock rate increases Mordor at 4K shows the EVGA 1070 SC at 49 FPS with MSI at 51.3 FPS and the Fe card at 40.7 FPS or noticeably slower than both it's actually 18.5% lead for EVGA over the Fe card so that's a pretty noticeable jump almost 20% and is a reason why you would want the a partner card other than The Thermals the noise and the price if you need more reasons in terms of dx2 12 we'll just show ashes of Singularity here which serves as one of the new API Benchmark games on our test platform at 1080 High we see similar tiering as before MSI 1070 marginally ahead of the EVGA 1070 SC and that's slightly ahead of the reference card between the MSI 1070 and the reference 1070 there's a more noteworthy gap of 8.79% the MSI 1070 and EVGA 1070 are separated by only 3.8% between the two of them 4K High post similar results MSI card runs at 49.84 FPS average in dx12 with EVGA running at 47.75 FPS average the reference card finally sits at 46.276720 plus one phase power design for the vrm and it's also got the same power header here so it's just 1 18 pin as opposed to something like this MSI 1070 which has an 8 pin and a six pin so considerably more power there about 75 Watts extra total power budget whether that's tapped into of course depends on a few other things but that's the theoretical power budget on that one now as we've said before we use real world applications to validate our overclock so as supposed to using something like just furmark where you generate one very specific type of load and place it on the GPU and don't necessarily see failures until getting into games we do only games or fire strike or something real world and that means that our overclock numbers are numbers that you should reasonably be able to achieve on your own device with General allowances for the Silicon lottery so let's get into the stepping for the GTX 1070 SC with evga's GTX 1070 SC we were observing a maximum core clock rate of 1847 MHz with fluctuations ranging between the 1786 MHz range and that Peak Point pushing V core further and of course doing some o gives us room but not a ton of room and we ended up with a 2025 MHz core clock that's with a 50 MHz offset from the EVGA pre OC base which is different from the founders Edition which has a obviously plus zero mehz procc we also had a 4608 MHz memory clock on evga's SC device and the power Target maxes out at 112% on this card with vcore maxing out at 1.75 volts clearly this is an Nidia V bios limiter for safety let's switch over to our Founders Edition card charts so you can see how this one steps up on the Fe card and this is from our Fe review when it first launched we were able to hit the very same 4608 MHz memory clock so that makes sense since they're basically the same Hardware but we had a slightly lower 1987 MHz core clock not that much lower though some of that difference can be chocked up to the Silicon Lottery and some of it can be attributed to just Superior cooling on the EVGA card which is helping us stabilize the clock rate as you pit It Against Time and look at the charts that way MSI on the other hand they go a bit hard so here's the look at their stepping the MSI GTX 1070 we've got that's the gaming X is pushing 2 75.5 MHz core and 4799 MHz memory that's an extra 50 MHz or so on the core that we're getting with an additional 200 MHz memory overclock MSI is using a custom PCB it's taller and it has a 10 plus one phase power design and an extra six pin power header for another 75 wats of power budget both of these do contribute to the additional clock rate gain over the EVGA 1070 SC card despite using a custom V bios though from what MSI told us anyway the card is still stuck at a 1.75 volt VC cor and that is something we validated the bit that MSI told us is that they have a custom V bios and that it should allow for some extra over voltage but we're not really seeing that here so we are seeing the same 1.75 volt Max for each of these devices and the 1070 Founders Edition card as for performance results with overclocking here's a look at the FPS metrics now generally we're seeing gaps of a few percentage points 1.8 is to 3.5% on average with only a few clock sensitive test showing anything more than that that's pretty expected for this type of OC though as the cards are already relatively close to their limit and you'll only see actual gains in OC clock sensitive applications and there are a few games that do that and in some production applications so is this EVGA card worth it well the 1070 SC falls mostly where the 1070 reference card Falls in terms of frame rate metrics your main differences are outside of FPS which makes sense cuz there's a lot more to these things than FPS thermals are critical often underd discussed and that is one of the places where the SC card does outperform the 1070 Fe handily and to that end with the EVGA 1070 SE again we were hitting 46.8 n Cel load delta T versus 53.86 C for the reference design that's an improvement and it's at a 100 MHz additional clock rate boost over what you get stock on the Fe card MSI does outperform EVGA particularly with overclocking but the outperformance is really not that much in gaming terms Now The Thermals MSI does pretty darn well with their thermals and most of that can be chocked up to this right here you'll see the 1070 SC is pretty much completely aisc that's cuz this card is much bigger it's got bigger fans nearing 100 mm and a larger block of aluminum and copper to help cool the thing so that's where you are seeing most of that performance difference with The Thermals noise the noise levels of all these things well of of these two things I should say are pretty similar as you've seen in our noise charts and that really brings us down to two things which is price and availability the thing is as we've said now the 1080 and 1070 today as of this video are pretty hard to get a hold of especially at their actual reasonable prices a lot of retailers are gouging right now as they're doing for the rx40 pre-orders and that's not something you want to fall into the Trap of because it's not worth it so the range for these cards is supposed to be I lay this down because it keeps falling uh the price range is supposed to be 380 to 450 we're not seeing that right now this card is priced at 440 you can find this particular gaming X from MSI at 460 and then you can find the gaming non X which has a lower clock rate for and a more similar vrm phase design to this card you can find that one for 440 as well uh either way $440 uh this this card is good this card is also good but uh I I wouldn't spend 440 today I would certainly not by the founders Edition card when you've got these two options on the table literally in this instance but they're just it it's still a little too expensive for my taste I think as these fall closer to the 400 to 420 Mark that would be where I would be more of a buyer for one of these cards and that's not to say the extra $20 is unfair or gouging but it it just it feels a little higher than it should be strictly because Nvidia did advertise that price floor as $380 so I would hang out a little bit let the stock in the inventory hit the shelves let it replenish itself as these retailers are able to get stock and meet the supply and demand without crazy fluctuations that they're seeing right now you will see these prices stabilize a bit there'll be rebates things like that free games whatever uh and that will all help with the value proposition but uh as a video card the 1070 SC is good the ACX 3.0 cooler is substantially improved over this if you don't want a blower fan this is a good option it's got the LEDs if you like those I don't normally talk about Aesthetics but you can figure that out on your own overclocking is okay it's not anything to get excited about this has better overclocking it might be more fun you're not going to see a performance difference that's really noteworthy but you will see extra clock rate increases that you won't get on this card by nature of the improved vrm phasing and more power and things like that so that should pretty much sum it up if you're trying to spend less this is the way to go hopefully it falls from 440 but otherwise I'd hang out for probably 3 to six weeks in that range you'll see more of these Pascal chips hitting shelves and after then the 480 will be launched anyway so there'll be some pressure to bring these prices down to what they should be based on the initial unveil so that's all I got for you this time overall that's it no no real strong positive or negative either way just depends on what you're looking for in the price patreon link the postol video if you want to help us out Link in the description below for more information and thanks for watching I'll see you all next time oh\n"