Galax GeForce GTX 1070 EXOC-SNPR Review – with RGB Lighting

Out of the 10 series graphics cards that NVIDIA released last year, the GeForce GTX 1070 seems to be the more popular one, as it offers a good balance between performance and price. It’s also fully capable of driving games on 1080p resolution; a sweet spot for 1440p gaming and can also drive games at 4K UHD with some adjustment on settings. Today we are going to look at and review the Galax GeForce GTX 1070 EXOC-SNPR, or in other region it’s the KFA2 GeForce GTX 1070 EXOC-SNPR. The GTX 1070 EXOC SNPR (short for Sniper) is somewhat the 2nd generation of the EXOC series. The GTX 1070 EXOC-SNPR offers some improvements from its predecessor like RGB lighting on its backplate, fan stops when idle or light load and a slightly different clock speed. If you’re planning to upgrade your graphics card this year or planning to build a new gaming rig for 1080p or 1440p gaming, or probably VR as well, please continue reading and check out our Galax GTX 1070 EXOC-SNPR review below.

Galax GTX 1070 EXOC-SNPR Review

Like many of the graphics card manufacturers in the market, Galax is offering several variants or editions of the GeForce GTX 1070. Galax has the following GTX 1070s: HOF Edition (their flagship), EXOC-SNPR, EXOC, EX, OC Mini, Virtual Edition (blower type) and the Founders Edition. The Galax GTX 1070 EXOC-SNPR is positioned just below the HOF or Hall of Fame edition. We previously reviewed Galax’s GTX 1080 HOF Edition, it’s a kickass graphics card by the way. Going back to the GTX 1070 EXOC-SNRP, this is basically an improved or updated version of the previous EXOC. Some of the improvements are RGB lighting on its backplate and two very silent fans that stops when the card is idle or below 45 degree Celsius.

For those who are still not acquainted with NVIDIA’s new Pascal graphics cards, specifically the GeForce GTX 1070, this one is like a cut down version of its higher end brother the GTX 1080. The GTX 1070 features a GP104 GPU die based on a 16nm fab process. It features 1920 CUDA cores, 15 streaming multiprocessors enabled, 120 TMUs, 64 ROPs and 6.45 TFLOPs of single-precision floating point performance.

The Galax GTX 1070 features 8GB of memory and it’s a GDDR5 instead of GDDR5X found in the GTX 1080. In terms of memory speed, the GDDR5 is not as fast as the GDDR5X but both offer the same amount of memory capacity. The memory has a bandwidth speed of 256GB/s and runs on a 256-bit memory interface. In terms of power consumption, Pascal has brought power efficiency on graphics cards to a new level. The previous Maxwell architecture were already power efficient, but the Pascal is even more power efficient. The GTX 1070 only requires a minimum of 500W power supply and it has a TDP of 150W. The custom build Galax GTX 1070 EXOC-SNPR also shares the same TDP and minimum PSU requirement, but it has a 6-pin + 8-pin power connector, instead of a single 8-pin found on the reference card (Founders Edition).

In addition to the components, new design and Pascal architecture, the GeForce GTX 10 series graphics cards (regardless of manufacturer) are basically equipped with the same set of features. These common features are Simultaneous Multi-Projection, VR Ready, NVIDIA Ansel, NVIDIA G-Sync, NVIDIA GameStream, Vulkan and DirectX 12 (12_1) API support, NVIDIA SLI with the new High Bandwidth (HB) Bridge support and the new NVIDIA GPU Boost 3.0.

Aside from the general set of features offered by the GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card, the Galax’s EXOC SNIPER edition features a custom PCB design with a 5+2 power phase design; 5 phase for the core and 2 phase for the memory. It also features a unique RGB aluminum backplate with RGB lighting to match the color of your system.

The Galax GTX 1070 EXOC-SNPR also offers factory overclock speeds out of the box at 1594 MHz base and 1784 MHz boost clock speed. It’s not the highest we’ve seen on all GTX 1070s, but it has the same clock speeds with several GTX 1070s like the EVGA GTX 1070 SC GAMING ACX 3.0, and it’s a tad faster compared to other GTX 1070s in the market.

Galax is also using Silent Extreme Technology that comprises of two 100mm fans that are very silent, even at near maximum speed. The fans also don’t turn on during idle or when temperature is below 45 degree Celsius. This is a common feature on graphics cards nowadays, keeping the graphics card dead silent when idle or in low load situations.

Below is a side by side comparison of the Galax GTX 1070 EXOC-SNPR and NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition specifications. Next page, we’ll take a closer look at the graphics card itself.

Galax GTX 1070 EXOC-SNPR Specifications