You may want to lower your hopes and expectations for the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, because according to unnamed sources in a story over at eTeknix, the GTX 1070 Ti will have its clocks locked. This restriction will be present on AIB vendors’ custom designs, as it appears NVIDIA will not be selling a reference card of their own.
This is quite an unfortunate rumor, as many potential customers were ready to purchase the $400-420 videocard and overclock it to obtain performance results on the level of the GTX 1080, or higher. As shown in the table below, and referenced in our previous GTX 1070 Ti story, the GTX 1080 and 1070 Ti are expected to share the same base clock, and have a 50 MHz difference in their boost speeds. The GDDR5 vs GDDR5X differences will likely make a performance difference as well.
As this is still a rumor, there may still be hope for overclocking the GTX 1070 Ti, but we wouldn’t put any money on it. As long as NVIDIA doesn’t go the way of Intel with a “pay to unlock” option, we think the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti will be a great competitor to AMD’s Radeon RX 56 in both performance and price.