GeForce GTX 1070 Ti officially coming November 2

Today, Nvidia officially revealed the specs and pricing for its upcoming GTX 1070 Ti graphics card. As we discussed earlier, the card is a beefed-up alternative to the GTX 1070 that ends up landing very close to GTX 1080. It fills the relatively small gap between the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, offering a high level of performance for a slightly lower price. How much will the cards cost? All we have right now is pre-order Founders Edition pricing, which is $449, so $50 less than the GTX 1080. That's the same as the previous price on the GTX 1070 FE, which has since dropped to an official MSRP of $399.

The key difference is that where the 1080 enables the full GP104 chip, the GTX 1070 Ti disables one SMM cluster of 128 cores. That gives it 2432 CUDA cores compared to the 1080's 2560 cores. The GTX 1070 had five SMMs turned off and only 1920 cores, so this is a significant step up in performance. Another difference is that the GTX 1070 Ti (and 1070) uses standard GDDR5 running at 8Gbps, while GTX 1080 cards use GDDR5X—the initial cards ran the memory at 10Gbps, and later models support 11Gbps. The 1070 Ti does raise the board TDP to 180W, matching the 1080's TDP, which isn't surprising considering the other specs.

Clockspeeds on the GPU are 1607MHz base and 1683MHz boost, according to the current product page—that's the same base clock as the 1080, but the boost clock is the same as the 1070. More importantly, despite earlier rumors to the contrary, the GTX 1070 Ti will be fully overclockable. Nvidia states, "We designed the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti to be an overclocking monster with plenty of headroom for gamers to crank up the clock speeds. And our partners have built cards with thermals and power supplies that allow gamers to push performance way past stock specifications." You'll note that Nvidia doesn't explicitly state that partners will offer factory overclocked cards, but that's likely more of a partner decision and shouldn't impact overclocking enthusiasts in any meaningful way.

If you're wondering why Nvidia is even bothering to fill the relatively small gap between the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080, there are two primary factors. First, the 1070/1080 are over a year old, so having a new (slightly tweaked/improved) product for the holidays is pretty common among GPU vendors. More importantly perhaps, AMD's recently launched RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 have brought additional competition to the high-end GPU market, and while the GTX 1080 normally beats the Vega 64, the Vega 56 actually placed slightly ahead of the GTX 1070 in quite a few games. By creating the GTX 1070 Ti, Nvidia ensures that its parts are faster at equivalent price points once again.

Performance should be a healthy jump over the GTX 1070, except in games that end up being bandwidth limited. That's not typically the case, meaning GTX 1080 levels of performance just got $50 cheaper, and perhaps we'll see even lower prices on the GTX 1070—that hit its all-time low of $350 back in February/March, before the cryptocurrency rush caused a surge in prices. Things have quieted down due to increasing mining difficulty, which has offset the record high valuation of Bitcoin.

The GTX 1070 Ti cards will officially go on sale on November 2, at which time we should have our full suite of gaming benchmarks.

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Jarred's love of computers dates back to the dark ages when his dad brought home a DOS 2.3 PC and he left his C-64 behind. He eventually built his first custom PC in 1990 with a 286 12MHz, only to discover it was already woefully outdated when Wing Commander was released a few months later. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Brigham Young University and has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge '3D decelerators' to today's GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance.