Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2017
Background: I don’t often write reviews, but I thought I’d share my experience after seeing limited reviews on amazon for this graphics card. I originally purchased an EVGA GTX 1070 FTW model. But after having to replace it once, having to struggle with crashing/instability, and then seeing reports of VRM heating issues/design flaws, I thought it was time for a change. I’ll be comparing the ASUS GTX 1070 STRIX ROG OC Edition to my experience with the EVGA GTX 1070 FTW model. Both are arguably the flagship ‘premium’ 1070 cards on the market.
Disclaimer: None. I bought this card with my own hard earned money :). Despite my somewhat negative experience with EVGA, I will give an honest comparison. I think both EVGA and ASUS are excellent companies, so I won’t be hating on either.
Ok! So let’s get to the good stuff!
Aesthetics: Obviously, this is based on personal taste, so you may disagree with me here. I really liked EVGA’s metal finish to their fan shroud as well as glossy finish to their logo. At first, I was disappointed to see a plastic shroud and finish on the ASUS STRIX ROG card. However, photos don’t do this card justice. The card looks amazing in person. The fan shroud has a nice gun metal/gray finish to it, which I personally like. The back plate has a nice finish to it, as well as a cool pattern and the ROG logo. The color of the card is neutral, so it can work with just about any build design/color. There are LED’s on the side, around the fans, and on the back plate with their logo. It’s all completely customizable. Nice.
Size/Form Factor: Wow! This card is HUGE! You MUST measure out if this card will fit in your case, unless you have a full size PC case. I have the Master Case Pro 5, a mid size case with plenty of room, and I STILL had to remove the drive bay adjacent to the motherboard to accommodate the sheer size of this GPU. Please, please, please, do your homework on this part to make sure this GPU will safely fit in your case.
Misc.: This card comes with two fan headers so you can hook up case fans to your GPU. This way, when your card is heating up it can directly control up to two fans in your case to help with cooling. This is a nice way to customize your case’s cooling setup so that not all the case fans are operating based on CPU temperature. It’s a nice feature. Who knows, maybe I’ll hook up an extra fan to it down the road. On another note, this GPU takes one 8 pin connector for power, has a 6 +1 power phase, and used premium components in their build. At first, I sort of rolled my eyes and figured this was all marketing jargon. But wow, it sure makes a difference. This card performs very well even when the voltage and max power limits are raised. None of that buzzing noise or coil whine. This card also comes with two HDMI ports instead of just one. I am not sure how many people this will apply to, but this is a single BIOS card, unlike the dual BIOS EVGA FTW card. So if you are a customer looking to apply custom BIOS, I'd recommend going for the double BIOS cards. Moving on...
Performance: I got the OC edition, and this card is advertised to get an 1860 mhz boost clock. Similar to my previous EVGA FTW card, this ASUS card far surpassed it’s advertised performance, without ANY overclocking or changes to default settings. At default settings, I recorded 2012 mhz, with 8014 memory clock, all running at a cool 58 degrees Celsius. This is pretty similar to default performance on my EVGA card out of the box.
Overclocking: Now the exciting part! I highly recommend OC’ing this card, as this edition is really designed to be overclocked and it’s free extra performance. If some of you are concerned, it comes with 3 years limited warranty. Even if you max the voltage/power settings (which I did), this is still within limits set by the manufacturer. So, after setting Max Voltage to 100%, Power Limit: 120%, Temp. Target: 92 degrees Celsius, I achieved a nice overclock of: 2152 mhz GPU (although it stabilized to 2139 mHz), and a memory overclock of 9208 mhz. I made my own custom aggressive fan curve, so this operated at a very nice 64 degrees Celsius. These settings were stable on Valley Benchmark for hours. I'm pretty impressed with this performance. I can’t really compare the OC to my old EVGA card, because much of the performance variance is due to luck and the silicon lottery. I can say that they perform within +/- 5% of one another… a negligible difference in my opinion.
Acoustics: At idle, this card is completely silent. Its fans don’t even turn on until it warms up a bit. The fans on this card are incredibly powerful. If you so desire, you could easily keep this card in the 50’s degrees Celsius, even with a hefty overclock. With overclocking, you are obviously sacrificing noise for performance. However, my personal limits for noise was when the fans passed 75% speed. WOW are they loud! As mentioned above, with my overclock the card maintained about 64 degrees Celsius, and this was with the fans operating at about 60-65% fan speed. Obviously, noise is very subjective and you may have a case that reduces sound better than mine, or you just won’t be bothered by it as much as me. I was very happy with the noise level when the fans were <75%.
Applications: The ASUS GPU Tweak application is what I used to overclock this card. It is very user friendly, with a lot of preset settings such as: OC mode, Gaming Mode, and Silent Mode. I like Silent mode when I am not gaming. It essentially underclocks the card to keep it cool and quiet. I would ignore the other two modes as they apply a laughably negligible overclock to your card. You are better off setting up a custom profile after you find the limits of your card.
Criticism: While the GPU Tweak application is nice, in order to control lighting and effects of your GPU you have to install another application called AURA. This is irritating. Why do I have to install another program just to control lights? Why can’t there be an additional tab on the Tweak application that is dedicated to lighting and special effects? Annoying. Another concern is due to the sheer size and weight of the card, I worry if I will have the dreaded GPU sag after a few months of use. Although the card looks sturdy and well built. Only time will tell. The last criticism is customer support. EVGA has 24/7 customer support, and the specialists tend to know what they are doing. In contrast, ASUS has limited hours for customer support, and I’ve been put on hold, told I’d receive a call back, or receive an e-mail, and it either took too long or never did. Big contrast here. In ASUS’ defense, I never had major issues with the card, and called for general inquiries. While EVGA’s service is excellent, I have had to call due to: fan control being broken, GPU temp exceeding 100 degrees Celsius, instability/crashing even when not overclocking, among other reasons. Only time will if ASUS’ card will perform will in the long run, I’ll be sure to post follow ups if anything happens.
Final Thoughts: The ASUS GTX 1070 STRIX ROG OC edition is an absolute beast of a card. At the least, it performance as well as any other flagship 1070 from other manufacturers. At its best, it provides a buttery gaming experience, quiet gaming free of buzzing/coil whine, amazing overclocking, and great thermals. Again, my biggest concern is the size of this card, so be sure to check that it’ll fit in your case. The card is sleek and sexy but also color neutral. If it fits your taste, it will go with just about any case design or color scheme. Regarding value, I have a 1440p 75 Hz HP Omen, and this card is able to operate on all games I’ve thrown at it on ultra settings and with FPS well above 75. Obviously, this may differ depending on what game you buy. If you are on a 1080P monitor, this is overkill and you may want to consider a GTX 1060 or the ASUS GTX 1070 STRIX ROG non-OC model. What this card *may* struggle with: 4k gaming (you’ll want to save up for the GTX 1080 in that case), and with 1440p gaming on a monitor with very high refresh rates such as 144 Hz.
At this point, I'd have to recommend the ASUS over the EVGA FTW graphics cards. As mentioned earlier, there are design flaws and issues with the current FTW cards. It's also not as neutral as the ASUS card, so it may not flow with any design or color scheme. Noise, acoustics, and performance are very user specific, depending on how you overclock/set fan settings, and in my personal experience both cards perform very competitively and produce similar levels of noise. If your heart is set on an EVGA card, then I'd recommend waiting for the FTW2 cards (which supposedly address all these issues) coming out sometime this year :).
If you are looking for a card that has quality written all over it and will last you, look no further! Happy gaming!!!
