Owners of the recently released NVIDIA GTX 1070 are having some issues with their video graphics cards that were manufactured by other companies aside from NVIDIA. The card in question is giving users a huge headache due to flickering, reduced memory overclocking results, visual glitches, crashes, and checkerboard artifacting. A few manufacturers moved fast to roll out a BIOS update while others are still in the process of making one.
Third party manufacturers used both Samsung and Micron memory chips for their own version of the GTX 1070, but the issues only happen when running Micron-equipped video cards. Tech site Guru3d has performed their own investigation of the issue and found out that, on the overclocking issue, the card runs fast but presents issues if the voltage adjustment goes up too quickly. If the voltage requirement is stable at 0.800V before applying the overclock, the card remains stable.
The bad thing about the Micron-equipped GTX 1070 is that even some users who do not overclock their cards are experiencing difficulties. Even when using the default configuration or settings, flickering and graphic artifacting still occur.
EVGA-made cards have their BIOS update up and ready, which can be downloaded by those who need it. This is also the case with Gainward (select graphics card model and BIOS download) and Palit cards (choose card model and download).
Other GTX 1070 card manufacturers, like Gigabyte and MSI, have acknowledged and stated that their updates will be available soon. Meanwhile, other companies like ASUS, Inno3D, KFA2/Galaxy, MSI, PNY, and Zotac have yet to issue an announcement, added WCCFTech.
Owners of the said card can check if theirs contain Samsung or Micron memory chips by using a tool called GPU-Z from TechPowerUp. Download, install, and run the simple tool under the Graphics Card tab, and the memory type field will show the brand of the chip installed, which should be either GDDR5 (Samsung) or GDDR5 (Micron).
It is also important to know that not all Micron-equipped GTX 1070 cards suffer the reported issues.
The GeForce GTX 1070 is a Pascal-based video graphics card that contains 8 GB of GDDR5 VRAM. It contains 1920 CUDA Cores, a base clock of 1506 MHz, and a boost clock of 1683 MHz.
