Asus GeForce GTX 1070 Strix Review

Conclusion

There have been many outcries over the price of the GTX 1000 series across the web, but from what we know from retailers the cards are still selling well (exceeding expectations, in fact). Even so, with the minimum GTX 1070 price being around £100 more than what the GTX 970 launched for, the cries are understandable – a sub-£300 price point would certainly have felt nicer. Really, though, Nvidia isn't under a whole lot of pressure when it comes to pricing, and the current structure will help when it comes to clearing through GTX 900 series stock as well.

It's also not as if the GTX 1070 is a bad card. In pretty much every way, it's rather awesome, in fact. The performance and efficiency are again great, and there are lots of nice new features with the Pascal architecture, especially for early VR adopters. We'd say that those customers, as well as anyone gaming or looking to game on a 1440p panel, are ripe for an upgrade to this GPU, and it typically offers better value for money than the GTX 1080 too. Still, at this stage it's worth waiting to see if Polaris forces Nvidia's hand at all with regards to pricing. While AMD is targeting the $199 price point with next week's launch, prices in the GPU market are all very relative, so there's at least the potential for knock-on effects.


We'd also like to see more innovative cooling solutions from Nvidia's partners that take advantage of the 150W TDP – the GTX 970 was a 145W part and had numerous ITX iterations.

Turning specifically to the Strix card now, it's clearly an impressive beast. You get a solid overclock out of the box (remember to set it to OC Mode for best performance) and an excellent cooler with RGB lighting allowing you to match it to your RGB case, fans, RAM, PSU, shoes, etc. We also think the dual-HDMI outputs are a neat idea for budding VR users. It certainly commands a hefty premium, arguably a little too much – a memory overclock and extended warranty would definitely sweeten the deal, and Asus's GPU software solutions definitely need work. On this latter point, we're told that a unified software solution (covering more than GPUs) is in the works. If you're chasing a GTX 1070 for purely bang for buck reasons, this isn't the SKU for you. However, if you're looking to get into VR and/or high resolution gaming, are lucky enough to have a £500 budget for graphics hardware but can't quite stretch to a GTX 1080 - £550 at least for a custom-cooled one, and often more – it's a compelling option with plenty to keep enthusiasts happy.