Nvidia opened up preorders for its stock version of the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti the moment it was announced, but if you were holding out for custom cards from Nvidia's hardware partners, you will find plenty of them by shopping around.
The usual suspects—Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, and Zotac—all have specially binned and custom cooled GeForce GTX 1070 Ti cards ready to go on launch today. A peek at Newegg shows no less than 15 cards available to preorder, ranging in price from $450 to $500. Amazon has quite a few GeForce GTX 1070 Ti cards up for grabs as well.
One thing that's interesting is that all of the initial cards have the same clockspeeds out of the box, with a 1,607MHz base clock and 1,683MHz boost clock. Even though Nvidia has talked up the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti's overclocking capabilities, it looks like it will be up to consumers to push clockspeeds.
Asus alluded to the situation when announcing its ROG Strix variants.
"Out of the box, all GeForce GTX 1070 Ti graphics cards run at the same stock clocks. However, we’ve been testing GPUs internally to see how comfortable they are at higher frequencies. The chips with the best overclocking potential are reserved for a special 'A8G' version of the ROG Strix 1070 Ti. Regardless of which card you choose, our GPU Tweak II software makes overclocking easy for beginners and veterans alike. OC Mode increases the GPU Boost clock with a single click, while extensive manual controls enable serious tuning," Asus explains.
What this means for consumers is that a little more research than usual is needed. With most cards, you can wade through the available cards and find a balance between overclocked specs and price. But with the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, you will need to dig a little deeper and see which ones are binned and built for added overclocking performance.
If overclocking performance is important to you, look for cards with more elaborate cooling solutions and higher end components. Generally speaking, these should have more overclocking headroom, though it's not a guarantee. Price is also an indicator, as faster cards (or in this case, cards that are capable of running faster) typically carry a pricing premium.
