Quote:It looks like NVIDIA bought itself a mountain of unsold GDDR5X memory, and is now refreshing its own mountain of unsold GP104 inventory, to make products more presentable to consumers in the wake of its RTX 20-series and real-time ray-tracing lure. First, it was the GP104-based GTX 1060 6 GB with GDDR5X memory, and now it's the significantly faster GeForce GTX 1070, which is receiving the faster memory, along with otherwise unchanged specifications. ZOTAC is among the first NVIDIA add-in card partners ready with one such cards, the GTX 1070 AMP Extreme Core GDDR5X (model: ZT-P10700Q-10P).

Much like the GTX 1060 6 GB GDDR5X, this otherwise factory-overclocked ZOTAC card sticks to a memory clock speed of 8.00 GHz, despite using GDDR5X memory chips that are rated for 10 Gbps. It features 8 GB of it across the chip's full 256-bit memory bus width. The GPU is factory-overclocked by ZOTAC to tick at 1607 MHz, with 1797 MHz GPU Boost, which are below the clock-speeds of the GDDR5 AMP Extreme SKU, that has not just higher 1805 MHz GPU Boost frequency, but also overclocked memory at 8.20 GHz. Interestingly, ZOTAC used the AMP Extreme's more premium triple-fan IceStorm cooling solution, while the original GTX 1070 GDDR5 AMP Core only features a dual-fan 2-slot cooler. Out of the box, this card's performance shouldn't be distinguishable from the GDDR5 AMP Core, but the memory alone should serve up a significant overclocking headroom.

Quote:The GeForce GTX 1070 AMP Extreme Core GDDR5X is almost a mirror image of the GeForce GTX 1070 AMP Edition. Both come with a 1,607 MHz base clock and 1,797 MHz boost clock. They are also equipped with 8GB of memory across a 256-bit memory interface.

The GeForce GTX 1070 AMP Extreme Core GDDR5X's memory is clocked at 2,002 MHz (8,008 MHz effective) just like the GDDR5 memory on the GeForce GTX 1070 AMP Edition. From a performance standpoint, the GDDR5X model offers zero benefits over the GDDR5 model, which is a darn shame considering that GDDR5X chips can clock all the way up to 10,000MHz.

Zotac listed the GeForce GTX 1070 AMP Extreme Core GDDR5X with a 250W TDP (thermal design power), which is 100W higher than a reference GeForce GTX 1070. It's understandable as the graphics card features a hefty factory overclock out-of-the-box. Curiously, the TDP on the GeForce GTX 1070 AMP Extreme Core GDDR5X is still 30W higher than the company's GeForce GTX 1070 AMP Edition model, which runs with the same overclock.