Gadgetory

I hear it all the time from you what hi and graphics cards are just too big we don't like fat graphics cards three slots really well for those of you who let your graphics cards are lean and still very mean I have just the product for you meet the new Galaxy at onna a gtx 1070 that keeps its elbows tucked in welcome back to harbor unboxed yes it is finally time for a deluxe katana review back in april when word broke that Galax would be introducing a single slot geforce gtx 1070 graphics card I just knew I had to have one thankfully Galax agreed and promptly sent one over ok enough bragging about my new gtx 1070 graphics card time to find out if it is actually any good but before we do jump to the benchmarks let's quickly go over the card and strip it down for some sexy PCB shots yeah i really need to get out more anyway down to business so obviously the galaxy toner is a bit special as there are very few single slot gaming graphics cards on the market these days but certainly a rare find in fact to my knowledge this is the only single slot air-cooled gtx 1070 in the world generally speaking anything sporting a thermal design power rating that's greater than 75 watts features a dual slot cooler strapped on to it as the larger coolers dissipate the added heat more efficiently this is a practical solution as it greatly reduces not just the operating temperatures but also the volume not only that but for years now desktop systems have been designed with dual slot graphics cards in mind so you might be wondering why bother making a single slot card at all then without question the gtx 1070 katana is a niche product that said though there are those out there who will love what this slim down graphics card has to offer there are compact small form-factor systems that can't afford to sacrifice expansion slots as their owners wish to install additional adding cards such as a sound card nvme SSD Thunderbolt 3 controller additional SATA ports and so on it is also worth noting that you will only require a single slot between the cards for SLI support rather than the typical two slot spacing this means you should actually see better operating temperatures with a pair of katana cards when compared to bigger dual slot cards on a board such as the Isuzu ROG Strix to 70g gaming or the as rockers and 270 m Xtreme for for example a few of you in the comments section of my latest unboxing video where I discovered the katana for the first time so that this is the card you would actually like to use in your workstation maybe even quite a few of them so that's an option as well anyway as I said this is a niche product and it certainly won't be for everyone but for those who have been seeking a relatively high in graphics card that only takes up a single slot then the katana will be a godsend as a single slot solution the katana measures just sixteen millimeters thick not bad given the pallet gtx 1080i that i just reviewed measured three times as wide even though this is a thin card it's still quite long measuring 254 millimeters and to end that said the PCB accounts for only 67% of the cards total length covering the entire front sight is a pancake like aluminium fan shroud which has been painted gunmetal grey towards the io end we find some cutouts in the fan shroud which are meant to help with cooling and at the opposite end we do of course find a 17 millimeter blower fan the fan pushes air over what Galax call a turbo radiator this is an all copper heatsink featuring advanced vapor chamber being that it is constructed entirely from copper it's a bit of a heavy sucker tipping the scales at 329 grams just for the heatsink in fact for a compact single slot card the katana is surprisingly heavy weighing 603 grams in total finally under the cooler we find a custom-designed PCB housing the gtx 1070 GPU and eight gigabytes of gddr5 memory gallic says it uses higher quality components in the construction of this card but doesn't go into detail other than assay it features an optimized electrical circuit what we do find under the hood is a 4+1 vrm which is the same configuration used by in videos found edition model though the vrm has switched sides of the GPU and is now placed behind the display outputs this layout means that the collects the GPU section of the heatsink first and then cools the inductors MOSFETs and capacitors of the VRM which can happily handle higher operating temperatures because Galax has gone with frequencies that are very close to in videos or in specific Asian they have stuck with the standard single a pin PCIe power input speaking of frequencies as the Box Galax has pushed their base frequency to 1518 megahertz and this is a very small increase over the stock fifteen hundred and six megahertz frequency this has resulted in a boost frequency at least seventeen hundred eight megahertz though of course GPU boost 3.0 will push the frequency higher when gaming for example the frequency was often seen hovering around seventeen hundred and seventy two megahertz but at times did drop down to seventeen hundred and thirty four megahertz when it comes to the splat puts Gaelic has had to make a few sacrifices due to the single slot design here we find just a single DisplayPort 1.4 output typically you can find three of these on a gtx 1070 accompanying that single DisplayPort connector is HDMI 2.0 B and a dual link DVI output if you are able to utilize all of these three outputs then you still can support three monitors simultaneously okay so that about covers everything it's time for the benchmarks please note our cable a core i7 7700 kg system was clocked at 4.9 gigahertz and we did test the gtx 1070 katana both in its out-of-the-box configuration as well as a custom overclocked overclocked we push the core to a base frequency of seventeen hundred and nineteen megahertz and the memory went to two thousand and two megahertz that's a 13% increase for the core and a 10% increase for the memory this overclock resulted in actual operating frequency of 1949 megahertz when gaming though we did have to increase the fan speed to eighty percent and this did make the card a bit loud anyway on to the results as expected the gtx 1070 katana was a few frames filed in the bigger beefier dual and triple slot ten 70s from pallet gigabyte and a soos that said out of the box the performance is still very respectable as the katana set a few frames ahead of the founders edition model not only that but rendering an average of 90 FPS in battlefield 4 at 1440p using the ultra high quality settings is nothing to sneeze at especially for a single slot card moving a Far Cry primal would find much the same the katana is able to best the found Edition once again while there's just a few frames we hung the bigger partner card models something I didn't point out previously is how the car performs once overclocked it's not going to beat Nova Club fuel slot card but still hitting 60fps in this test was impressive all the same though again it was a bit loud with our overclocked Star Wars Battlefront doesn't provide anything we haven't seen already so I'll wrap up the benchmarks here score at least the graph results and I'll move on to a few minutes of gameplay then after that we will check out the Federals and power consumption I had a quick player in with battlefield 1 doom and pray let's see how the katana got on I didn't really know exactly what to expect from the galaxy gtx 1070 katana when it came to temperatures other than I expected them to be high just how high though was hard to say however a two degrees I was pleasantly surprised out of the box the card wasn't even that loud the fact that it came in a degree under the founder decision while providing slightly better performance is mighty impressive overclock the card also hit 82 degrees though the fan speed was increased quite a bit and while far from reference card layout it was still pretty loud for those wondering I did check surface temperatures with an infrared heat gun and found the shroud towards the center of the cartridge 44 degrees which was surprisingly cool the cutouts are the fan shroud where the hot air exits the card did hit 56 degrees but even then that's very reasonable now here are some samples of the operating volumes when it came to power consumption the katana was very respectable consuming only slightly more power than the founders edition model even overclock it still consumed less power than most custom bored partner cards do out of the box so a good result here well there you have it the Galaxy etx 1070 katana a small or rather thin graphics card that still gets the job done while very impressive I guess it's not totally surprising given they are now cramming gtx 1070 and even 1080 GPUs into laptops but hey it's still one of a kind currently pricing is a bit of an unknown you can buy it directly from the Gallic store in the US for four hundred and twenty dollars which isn't too bad though the cheapest 10 seventies are currently selling for around $380 right now still given this is the world's only single slot gtx 1070 you can't really complain about the price it's hardly a huge premium to pay anyway also keep in mind once availability does improve pricing will likely as well overall I found the operating temperature and volume very acceptable as the Box performance is also great and the card itself does look quite smart for those seeking a slim high and graphics card there simply is no better option I guess you could argue those because there is no other option but still it is a good graphics card so that's it for this one I'm your host Steve and do stay tuned because tomorrow we will have that rise in 1400 1600 and 1700 comparison I'll see you guys then