Go small or don’t go at all. That seems to be the idea one company had in making a powerful new graphics card for the Mini-ITX crowd. Gigabyte has accomplished just that, quietly releasing the GeForce GTX 1070 Mini ITX OC graphics card alongside its new GeForce GTX 1070 Xtreme Gaming full-size solution. The former squashed version measures only 37(H) x 169(L) x 131(W) millimeters whereas the latter model is a larger 57(H) x 291(L) x 140(W) millimeters. Honestly, the Mini-ITX OC model is simply cute.
According to the specs, the Mini-ITX OC card features the GeForce GTX 1070 graphics chip, 8GB of GDDR5 on-board memory, and a custom-designed cooling system to make sure the little graphics card doesn’t get heated under the typical PC gaming pressure. It’s built for overclocking despite its size, allowing users to boost the base clock speed with just a simple mouse click.
As for the cooling system, it consists of a 90mm fan with blades featuring a triangle edge and a “3D stripe” curve that, according to Gigabyte, enhances air flow by up to 23 percent when compared to your typical GPU fan. This fan, which can remain off during light PC gaming or web browsing, is backed by three pure-copper composite heat-pipes that are shaped to maximize their direct contact to the actual graphics chip. These heat pipes consist of a hollow pipe, sintered powder, a liquid, and an outer copper “shell” lined with axial grooves.
The specs show that this new Mini-ITX card has three modes: OC Mode, Gaming Mode, and Eco Mode. For the former, the base clock speed is 1,556MHz and the boost clock speed is 1,746MHz whereas the Gaming Mode provides a base clock speed of 1,531MHz and a boost clock speed of 1,721MHz. These can be changed using Gigabyte’s free Xtreme engine utility, which also provides a setting for an Eco Mode that the company doesn’t detail on the product page.
As for other features, the new card offers an 8,008MHz memory clock, a 256-bit memory bus, and requires a PCI-e 3.0 x16 slot. There are also two dual-link DVI-D ports, one HDMI 2.0b port with a max resolution of 4,096 X 2,160 at 60Hz, and one DisplayPort 1.4 connector. The total digital maximum resolution offered by this card is 7,680 x 4,320 spanning across four monitors.
If you’re looking to cram this new GTX 1070 “Pascal” card into your Mini-ITX system, Gigabyte suggests using a 500-watt power supply. It’s ready for virtual reality despite its compact size, backed by Nvidia’s VRWorks technologies spanning sight, sound, touch, and object behavior. Nvidia’s Pascal GPU architecture was seemingly built with VR in mind, and now owners of Mini-ITX systems can upgrade their setups with a high performance, VR-focused solution provided by Gigabyte.
As always, Gigabyte doesn’t provide a price on its product page. However, as a reference, the company’s older GeForce GTX 970 Mini ITX OC model with 4GB of memory can be found on Newegg for $320. The starting price for the full-blown GTX 1070 base model is only $379.
