Next chapter of my odyssey of getting a GTX 1070, after all the issues with drivers and Windows compatibility (or maybe before them?), is the actual hardware build.
I've never built a PC by myself, so I actually asked a friend (technician of some sort) for help. Still, I'm not entirely convinced of how the build turned out, even though he said it should be ok...but then again, it's an "ok" result for a 2k build at this point, which really pisses me off for the potential it has to turn into a bad investment.
Anyway, since the GTX 1070 is a big card I needed to buy a new case for it. I thought to myself, "hey, 500€ card, don't be cheap on the case now!" and went with the MasterCooler Pro 5...'cause what could possibly be wrong with a 160€ case by what is maybe the most popular manufacturer?
As it turns out, there wasn't really much room in length to put the card in (but we made the space by removing one of those "drawers" for the DVD reader/HDD), but the real problem was actually the height. I'm probably going to ask in some coolermaster-specific forum about this too, but for now I'm concerned about how my GPU might be affected.
The thing is, I'm pretty sure that the motherboard is in the right spot, because the opening on the back of the case (the one where the ports of the motherboard are; the HDMI output, the audio output, and so on) is exactly aligned with the ports of the motherboard that are supposed to come out of it. So I figured that the motherboard is probably in the right spot.
However, when we put the GPU in the motherboard, we discovered that the video card couldn't descend completely into the motherboard slot. The problem seems to be that the metallic side of the card (the one that touches the case, and the one where you then put the screws to bind it to the case) "touches" the case a bit too early, meaning that the outer side of the card can't descend completely (whereas the other side of the card can).
We still managed to fit "enough" of it in the motherboard, and we screwed the screws in to attach it to the case. It doesn't wobble around, and it seems to work decently so far (I tried running FurMark and it gave a score that seems comparable to others). I also checked on GPU-Z, and the card is there. I tested a non-demanding game and it worked. Still, for the price of this card, having it half-way in is just awful to think about.
On another note, the clock speed...the card was advertised on Amazon (where I bought it) as a 1721 MHz card. Tested on FurMark (maybe not to its full potential), it had somewhere around 1650-ish MHz on average. In GPU-Z, by default, it has 1506 MHz, with a "boost" of 1683.
Maybe I'm reading the numbers wrong, and I definitely have no idea whether or not that advertised "1721" should be the base clock, the "boost", or whatever. All I know is that I can't find any trace of 1721 anywhere, and right now I'm thinking that the card I have is simply not the one that was supposed to be sold to me.
This is the official description of the product on amazon:
I've never built a PC by myself, so I actually asked a friend (technician of some sort) for help. Still, I'm not entirely convinced of how the build turned out, even though he said it should be ok...but then again, it's an "ok" result for a 2k build at this point, which really pisses me off for the potential it has to turn into a bad investment.
Anyway, since the GTX 1070 is a big card I needed to buy a new case for it. I thought to myself, "hey, 500€ card, don't be cheap on the case now!" and went with the MasterCooler Pro 5...'cause what could possibly be wrong with a 160€ case by what is maybe the most popular manufacturer?
As it turns out, there wasn't really much room in length to put the card in (but we made the space by removing one of those "drawers" for the DVD reader/HDD), but the real problem was actually the height. I'm probably going to ask in some coolermaster-specific forum about this too, but for now I'm concerned about how my GPU might be affected.
The thing is, I'm pretty sure that the motherboard is in the right spot, because the opening on the back of the case (the one where the ports of the motherboard are; the HDMI output, the audio output, and so on) is exactly aligned with the ports of the motherboard that are supposed to come out of it. So I figured that the motherboard is probably in the right spot.
However, when we put the GPU in the motherboard, we discovered that the video card couldn't descend completely into the motherboard slot. The problem seems to be that the metallic side of the card (the one that touches the case, and the one where you then put the screws to bind it to the case) "touches" the case a bit too early, meaning that the outer side of the card can't descend completely (whereas the other side of the card can).
We still managed to fit "enough" of it in the motherboard, and we screwed the screws in to attach it to the case. It doesn't wobble around, and it seems to work decently so far (I tried running FurMark and it gave a score that seems comparable to others). I also checked on GPU-Z, and the card is there. I tested a non-demanding game and it worked. Still, for the price of this card, having it half-way in is just awful to think about.
On another note, the clock speed...the card was advertised on Amazon (where I bought it) as a 1721 MHz card. Tested on FurMark (maybe not to its full potential), it had somewhere around 1650-ish MHz on average. In GPU-Z, by default, it has 1506 MHz, with a "boost" of 1683.
Maybe I'm reading the numbers wrong, and I definitely have no idea whether or not that advertised "1721" should be the base clock, the "boost", or whatever. All I know is that I can't find any trace of 1721 anywhere, and right now I'm thinking that the card I have is simply not the one that was supposed to be sold to me.
This is the official description of the product on amazon:
What's the deal with it? Why are there two sets of GPU clock, boost/base?