OT - GTX1070 mini question

Charlie Judge

This mini version of the GTX1070 graphic card is significantly less expensive than the larger size versions

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LLAJ8PU/ref=dra_a_rv_hp_hn_xx_P1910_1000?tag=dradisplay-20&ascsubtag=537579ef9740dd4d19b16eaaeec7efdf_S

Is there any signficant downside to the mini versus the larger versions?

dragotx

From looking at the specs it's got fewer cuda cores and a lower clock speed.

Taoz

dragotx said:

From looking at the specs it's got fewer cuda cores and a lower clock speed.

I see 1920 cores (standard for all 1070 AFAIK) for all four?

But max power consumption varies a lot, from 150 W (mini) to 250 W (AMP!). That's kind of strange.

Charlie Judge

Taozen said:

dragotx said:

From looking at the specs it's got fewer cuda cores and a lower clock speed.

I see 1920 cores (standard for all 1070 AFAIK) for all four?

But max power consumption varies a lot, from 150 W (mini) to 250 W (AMP!). That's kind of strange.

And the 1702 clock doesn't seem that much slower than the 1784 clock of the EVGA.and the lower power consumption might be a plus.

But what I was particularly wondering about was: Would there be any problem with cooling when using the mini to do Iray renders for an extended time?

Taoz

Charlie Judge said:

Taozen said:

dragotx said:

From looking at the specs it's got fewer cuda cores and a lower clock speed.

I see 1920 cores (standard for all 1070 AFAIK) for all four?

But max power consumption varies a lot, from 150 W (mini) to 250 W (AMP!). That's kind of strange.

And the 1702 clock doesn't seem that much slower than the 1784 clock of the EVGA.and the lower power consumption might be a plus.

But what I was particularly wondering about was: Would there be any problem with cooling when using the mini to do Iray renders for an extended time?

Probably not, it has two fans like many other 1070 including mine (mine is about 60 C when rendering and also uses 150 W). Just be sure to have good cooling in the case, that's important. But I'd check if the fans are running all the time or only when it gets hot, like with the AMP editions, the fans last longer that way. 

As for clock speed it's usually a good bit higher than stated, so you can't always trust the specs here.

Silver Dolphin

The reason you don't want the mini version of 1070 is cooling. Only comes with one fan you want all the cooling you can get and then you need to get MSI Afterburner and turn off the auto cooling and turn the fan up to 100% or you are gonna cook your fancy new 1070 doing Iray.

JamesJAB

Silver Dolphin said:

The reason you don't want the mini version of 1070 is cooling. Only comes with one fan you want all the cooling you can get and then you need to get MSI Afterburner and turn off the auto cooling and turn the fan up to 100% or you are gonna cook your fancy new 1070 doing Iray.

Did you even look at the card, or read any of the other posts in tis thread?
It has dual large diameter fans, and it has a nice heatsink (with heat pipes and thin fins) that extends about an inch past the back of the card.  And for your information turning off the fan when not needed just means that when the chip is not drawing much power, the heatsink alone is enough to cool it. As I am typing this on my quadro k5000m powered laptop my GPU fan is not spinning because web browsing only requires the lowest performance state.

That card looks like a good purchase.  All the reviewers on newegg love the card and praise it's ability too cool the GPU even in little itx cases.  Honestly these mini 1070 cards where probably binned as not quite good enough to be a notebook version, That still would mean they can do the job using less power and generating less heat than the ones on the full size regular cards.  The other thing to consider is that the 1070 is only a 150w card.
For comaprison... GTX 770 = 230w, GTX 570 = 219w, GTX 275 = 219w.  With these newer generation cards you are getting a lot more performance per watt (Nvidia has learned a lot from their entrance into the mobile gaming market several years ago)

You do not want to mess with the fan profile (unless you want to needlessly wear out your fan early).  If you are planning on overclocking the card past the manufacturer spec, then get a full length card with 3 fans.