Standard Full height gpu is 127mm from bottom of metal bracket, itx 1070 should be near 150mm, isn't it?
The card is currently assembled into the case, but I will check that tonight for you.
How easily can you remove the shroud? How many pins does the fan-header have
I'll check that tonight as well, I didn't think to look for that type of stuff!
would it be okay to use your pics in the wiki article?
Yeah of course, go for it.
Still pretty interesting that they went with a single fan instead of two like the 960.
The 960 card is 10mm longer so they probably couldn't fit 2 of the same size fans, the fans used in the 960 are very quiet so I can understand why they selected the same fan model in the 1070. Although they probably could have fitted a 100mm version if they tried.
And I thought the two stripes on the 1070 were LEDs that can change color? Guess not after all.
The stripes are just painted on, I'm not sure that any of the Gigabyte cards with this design scheme have LEDs in these strips? I saw a Gigabyte 1080 with this orange/black shroud (the dual fan version) in operation, the stripes were not lit up, but the Gigabyte logo on top of the shroud was glowing blue.
This ITX card doesn't appear to have any LEDs, even though you can select some LED options in the Gigabyte GPU software.
Now onto the good stuff - How does the Gigabyte GTX 1070 perform in the LZ7, read on to find out:
LZ7 and the GTX 1070
The GTX 1070 is a 150W card compared to the 120W GTX 960 that has been tested in the LZ7 up to now. I managed to do some brief testing yesterday evening to get a feel for what this card performs like in terms of thermals and noise, I must say I am truly impressed with this little card.
The GTX 1070 is probably going to be the most powerful ITX card of this generation, AMD may be able to beat it with Vega, but that's in the future. Aside from the R9 Nano at 175W TDP, the GTX 1070 and GTX 970 (or an RX 480 ITX if they ever release one) are realistically the highest TDP cards you can put in this case at 150W.
For this reason I think that testing the LZ7 with a GTX 1070 will give a good indication of how the case can handle its likely maximum load.
Please bare in mind that all temperatures, performance and noise claims need to be verified with more in depth testing that will posted over the next few weeks.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
The Gigabyte card feels solid and weighty, the aesthetics also don't look as tacky as they come across in the online product shots, the orange stripes look OK and actually sort of compliment the LZ7 aesthetics. In the UK it is priced at £410 which puts it just under the founders edition price with a small OC out the box, offering good overall value.
INSTALLATION
Fitting it into the case was straight forward, it just drops drops in as normal, the only issue being the card is too tall for this prototype version (v0.1). The next prototype will be tall enough to fit the 1070 (v0.2), I am thinking an extra 7mm height will be sufficient, the case will be shortened slightly to keep the volume under 7 Litres.
NOISE LEVELS
For starters I didn't realise that it actually had a semi-fanless mode, I was surprised by this because Gigabyte's previous 900 series mini cards didn't have this feature, but it's great they have decided to introduce it into the 1000 ITX models.
The fan remains turned off up to a certain temperature, this temperature is determined by the 3 fan profiles you can select from.
I have used a Gigabyte GTX 970 ITX card in the past and the fans on that were uncomfortably loud, especially when compared to the Asus 970 ITX version which ran much quieter. I would say that this Gigabyte 1070 card runs quieter even than Asus 970 card, it looks like Gigabyte have made some real progress on their cooler design. I will do some more detailed noise tests to verify this.
When the fans do spin up they are pretty much silent (to my ears) at their lowest level which was in the region of 1100rpm. At 1500rpm the fans can be heard across the living room but only faintly. To put that into context, sitting on my sofa in my living room 3.5m away from the LZ7 (next to the TV), I can hear my fridge in the next room louder than the GPU fans spinning at 1500rpm. If the fans get to the region of 2000+ rpm they are quite loud though (achieved in turbo fan mode), but in my (limited) testing the fans topped out at around 1600rpm to keep temps in check when using silent fan mode.
Here is the case sat on top of my AV cabinet, as you can see the top panel is resting on top of the GPU power cable, on a side note the orange lights of the Pheonix motherboard go well with the orange GPU stripes
@iFreilicht hint hint:
FAN PROFILES
Within the Gigabyte software you can select all sorts of adjustments including clock speeds, boost speeds, power limits, thermal targets, etc. As well as a good selection of fan control options, here are the 3 main fan profiles:
Standard
The standard fan profile keeps the fan off until the GPU reaches 60C, at which point the fan starts at around 40% which equates to a fan speed of around 1550rpm. This then ramps up in a linear line to 100% at around 80C.
Turbo
There is also a turbo mode which has a higher starting % and a more aggressive line up to 100% speed, off the top of my head I can't remember much more than that, from my testing it was keeping the card unnecessarily cool with noticeably more noise. But perhaps in cases with restricted airflow and ventilation this profile may be required.
Silent
Save the best for last! This profile is best suited for the LZ7, it is indeed silent under normal and light gaming usage and quiet under stress load. The fan starts at a lower temp of 50C but with a power of around 30% for a fan speed of about 1100rpm which can't really be heard, I think it starts at a lower temp to prevent the card from cycling the fans on and off if your card is idling in the 50C's. The fan power gently rises to about 40% at 83C (1550rpm) which is the thermal target temp, the fan profile then ramps up steeply after this point to 100% at 90C.
THERMAL PERFORMANCE
In the LZ7 the 1070 idles at around 45C with the fan off. The slight positive pressure inside the LZ7 creates a small warm breeze out the vents around the GPU which likely assisting the GPU in keeping temps down with the GPU fan off.
When I get round to doing some more detailed testing I will see what effect turning the case fan off has on idle GPU temps.
The LZ7 has been designed to allow Graphics Cards to exhaust in 360 degrees catering for all the different cooler designs used in ITX GPUs. The Gigabyte GTX 1070 ITX exhausts through vents on its IO plate, but most of the warm air is exhausted through the rear of the card.
This warm air is blown straight out the front vents of the case:
This setup in combination with the 140mm case fan creating positive pressure means that very little GPU heat is circulated back into the case. When the 1070 is being stressed the air stream passing through these vents is noticeably warmer than what I could feel from the 960 as you would expect.
Unigine Valley
The first thing I tried was Unigine Valley, I let this run for around an hour to get a good idea of how well the card performs maxed out.
The fan profile was set to silent, pretty much as soon as you start the benchmark the card goes above 50C activating the fan. As mentioned above the silent fan profile remains under 40% until it gets to about 83C, it took about 20 minutes for the card to reach this temperature which was a pleasant surprise, in the end the fan settled at about 1600rpm to maintain this target temperature.
Clock speed wise Gigabyte state it has a boost speed of 1721 MHZ, but the software was reporting the card was sitting at more like 1800 MHZ. Throughout the Valley testing the card was bouncing between 1820 MHZ and 1780 MHZ, no throttling was witnessed.
I then set the fan profile to 'standard' to see what would happen, the fans span up noticeably louder but the temps shot down to under 70C and in turn the fans then settled down to a much quieter level.
Dying Light
I had the computer hooked up to my TV which is only a 1080p display, I understand that this isn't exactly going to challenge the GTX 1070, however it was still a massive shock to discover the shear level of performance and efficiency this card offers, I'll explain below.
Dying light isn't the latest and greatest of graphical games, but it still offers impressive graphics which was a challenge for the GTX 960 to maintain 60fps.
The 1070 was set to its silent fan profile and all the game settings were turned up to maximum with Anti Aliasing enabled at 1080p 60Hz resolution.
I started playing the game and after about 10 minutes I suddenly thought - why can't I hear the GPU fan? After checking the Gigabyte monitoring software it turned out that the card was only running between 50C and 55C so the fans were only spinning at their minimum rpm.
This is where it gets good, it turns out that to run Dying Light at 1080p with maxed out settings the GTX 1070 is only clocking itself at 850 MHZ!!!
Holy Crap, this card has so much power that it treats 1080p like a walk in the park, the LZ7 was running virtually silent, I am a very happy man.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I set out with the goal of designing a small but quiet gaming case, with the help of this Gigabyte GTX 1070 ITX card it is looking promising so far. I will put together some more detailed testing over the next few weeks including some more demanding games to get a better idea of its performance.
The vent configuration of the LZ7 compliments the exhaust design of the Gigabyte card, allowing the GTX 1070 to really let rip without having to worry about excessive noise or thermal issues.
Stay tuned for more testing.
