Time to pop to the kitchen for the obligatory pinch of salt. A new rumour (or potentially two) is doing the rounds today regarding the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, and it will probably reduce any potential enthusiasm gamers might have for the as-yet unreleased card.

On one hand, it is claimed that NVIDIA will not be releasing reference cards direct to consumers, and instead partners will be shouldering the burden of manufacturing and selling the new model. So far, no big deal - PCB designs can be based on the GTX 1070 or 1080 and they have a plethora of cooling solutions which will be more than up to the task. The hitch however is that allegedly all partner cards will have identical stock clocks and factory overclocking will be prohibited.

Okay, so that's a little worrying if you're an NVIDIA partner, but it could be worse for consumers. At least you'll be able to overclock it afterwards. Well... about that...

The second rumour is that all overclocking on the GTX 1070 Ti will be prohibited, as in disabled at the board level. No factory overclocks, no consumer overclocks; the reference speeds & GPU Boost will be the only performance indicators, both of which are out of anyone's control except NVIDIA.

If the latter is true then both rumours are likely true, but it's possible that only factory specs will be restricted. Or someone, somewhere has their wires crossed and both eventualities are complete tripe. It's in no way clear why NVIDIA would enforce this policy as overclocking GPUs is a great value-added for the consumer and an important selling point for their AIC partners. In preventing overclocking they squander plenty of goodwill in the hopes of what, that their new card won't beat a stock GTX 1080 that was released 16 months ago?

There is one party that would be quite pleased by a locked NVIDIA GPU: AMD. Despite Vega's rocky launch and ongoing lack of partner designs, new practices from competitors which restrict consumer features and partner flexibility can only be a good thing from their perspective.

Currently NVIDIA aren't answering questions on the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, a card that hasn't been officially announced and isn't expected to be until October 26th. Market availability won't be until November 2nd however, so whichever way the truth lies should be apparent before consumers are able to purchase the card.

SOURCE: via Videocardz.com