Question Zotac or Gigabyte?

Oct 4, 2023
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I have a bunch of graphics card to choose from, I dismantled a crypto farm and I have a lot of graphic cards.
Part of the deal was that I can keep components to build my own PC for free as a reward for my help in the task.
Much of them are very basic and old, but these 2 came to my eyes:
  • Zotac 1070 with 8GB
  • Gigabyte 1070 with 8GB
The Zotac looks to me much better in quality than the Gigabyte. The constructions and components seems superior to me, it is even aluminium. So I am thinking in keep the Zotac for me.
Wich one would you choose and why? Both cards are RTX 1070 with 8GB memory. I am planning to use 2 identical cards in SLI. So what are your bets?

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The construction of the shroud and cooling doesn't really mean much if they both use a reference design board. You'd have to take off the heat sink to really figure out if the card itself is "high quality" or not.

At this point since these are older cards and from a mining setup, you pretty much have a 50/50 shot at one being "better" than the other.
 

Phaaze88

Titan
Ambassador
The card at the top isn't from Zotac, it's Zogis:

The other card is the G1 Gaming, and uses a custom PCB.
The Zogis would need to be taken apart to see what kind of PCB it uses; I can't find much info on it. It's probably one of those region exclusive cards.
 

SyCoREAPER

Honorable
Jan 11, 2018
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The card at the top isn't from Zotac, it's Zogis:

The other card is the G1 Gaming, and uses a custom PCB.
The Zogis would need to be taken apart to see what kind of PCB it uses; I can't find much info on it. It's probably one of those region exclusive cards.
On that merit alone unless the gigabyte has issues functionally or disassembled I'd 100% go gigabyte.

Never heard of Zogis, claims they are US based but I don't recall ever seeing their cards on shelves.

 
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Oct 4, 2023
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Sorry for the late reply, I ended up asking for both options to the owner and I have now both of them for testing. Glad too be corrected that these are ZOGIS GTX 1070 SuperClock and the GIGABYTE GTX 1070 G1 Gaming. This was useful to determine that both cards are practically identical. Also I liked the Zogis more because it seems to have a better construction and quality. I ordered replacement fans from Aliexpress for the Gigabyte one because they were broken. Zogis ones are in good condition even if they have the same age in the mining setup.

IMG_20231010_180050018.thumb.jpg.cb443c9909ce7a2df48d04a95fac3ad6.jpg

Since there are mixed concerns about one and the other I will do a benchmark to determine wich is better in performance and temperature and I will let you know the results.

Thanks for all your help with choosing :giggle:
 
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Honestly, just take the one that looks less-worn-out. Both Zotac and Gigabyte have been making cards for well over a decade and they know what they're doing. Zotac is a division of PC Partner, the company that also owns Inno3D and manufactures the Radeon reference cards.

I'm sure that I don't have to tell you who Gigabyte is. ;)

As for SLI, don't waste your time. Neither SLI nor Crossfire has been viable for more than six years. If you want to take two cards, just use one and keep the other as a spare or sell it because SLI won't do you any good. All it will do is require you to have a more potent (and therefore more expensive) power supply and a motherboard with more than one PCIe×16 slot.

Looking at the two, I definitely like the look of the Zotac better but let's be fair, it's not often that we actually look at our video cards when they're in our PCs which makes their aesthetic appearance more or less irrelevant. My ASRock Radeon RX 7900 XTX Phantom Gaming OC has a ton of RGB lighting on it but it doesn't really matter because I'm always looking at the screen, not the card. I only bought it because it was an open-box at Newegg for more than $200CAD off the regular price (making it cheaper than the RX 7900 XT). I did not care what brand it was or what it looked like. It could've been a base-model Sapphire Pulse or XFX SWFT for all I care.

I've had cards by ATi, Albatron, ASRock, Gigabyte, Palit, PNY, Sapphire and XFX. The only problem that I ever had was with an XFX RX 5700 XT but I don't blame XFX for that because it was the sixth XFX card that I've ever owned and the previous five were perfect.

Brand doesn't matter. Noobs buy by brand, experts buy by spec.
 
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Order 66

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Apr 13, 2023
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Brand doesn't matter. Noobs buy by brand, experts buy by spec.
Brand sometimes matters especially with power supplies. As far as GPU brands I would go for whatever one you think you should get as the difference in performance is negligible. You may get better cooling by going with a certain brand but usually you have to pay more as well.
 
Oct 4, 2023
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So as promised I have done a benchmark, and the gigabyte wins this round.... even if the Zotac looks nicer, the Gigabyte wins in the benchmark. So I will keep the Gigabyte ones even if they have cheapest manufacturing. Thanks for all you knowledge and advices :D
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