Announced again in April, Galax's GTX 1070 Katana caught our attention for counting itself most of the few unmarried-slot gaming snap shots cards available nowadays. In truth, to the exceptional of our information, that is the only single-slot, air-cooled GTX 1070 inside the global, as something with a thermal design strength of 75 watts or higher is commonly paired with a twin-slot cooler for the introduced warmth dissipation.

Dual-slot coolers are realistic because they could take care of more warmness and that they tend to be quieter, not to mention that computer hardware has been designed with twin-slot graphics cards in mind for years. Taking that into attention, you is probably questioning why all people might hassle with a single-slot card at all then.

There's absolute confidence that this is a spot product, however it have to call to compact gadget developers who might as an alternative not sacrifice an extra growth slot, that could otherwise be used for hardware which include a dedicated sound card, an NVMe SSD, a Thunderbolt three controller, or more SATA ports.

This card can also grow to be a popular desire for the ones constructing workstations with multiple high-quit pictures cards due to the fact you best need a single slot between the cards for SLI aid in preference to the typical slot spacing, which is to say that pair of Katana playing cards ought to supply better working temperatures than larger twin-slot cards on boards which includes the Asus ROG Strix Z270G Gaming or Asrock Z270M Extreme 4, for example.

Being this kind of unique locate, we knew we needed to evaluate the Katana.

As a unmarried-slot answer, the card measures simply 16mm thick. By contrast, the Palit GTX 1080 Ti that I just reviewed measured 3 instances as wide.

While the Katana is thin, it spans a fairly long 254mm cease to quit, even though its PCB best money owed for sixty seven% of that total period. Covering the entire front facet is a pancake-like aluminium fan shroud which has been painted gunmetal gray.

Towards the I/O quit we find a few cutouts in the shroud to help with cooling and at the other stop we discover a 70mm blower that pushes air over what Galax calls a 'rapid radiator', which amounts to an all-copper heatsink providing a sophisticated vapor chamber.

Considering its copper production, this thing on my own hints the scales at 329 grams, even as the Katana weighs 603 grams in overall -- relatively heavy for a compact unmarried-slot GPU.

Under the cooler we find a custom PCB sporting the GTX 1070 GPU and 8GB of GDDR5 memory. Galax says it used terrific components in the card's creation, however does not difficult past saying that it functions an optimized electric circuit.

What we discovered turned into a 4+1 VRM that is the same configuration used by Nvidia's Founders Edition model, even though the VRM has switched facets and is now positioned at the back of the display outputs. This format allows cool air to hit the GPU segment of the heatsink first before cooling the inductors, MOSFETs and capacitors of the VRM, which can thankfully cope with better working temperatures. Because Galax has caught to frequencies which can be near Nvidia's specification, in addition they kept the usual unmarried eight-pin PCIe electricity connector.

Galax has driven the base frequency to 1518MHz, a small boom over the inventory fee of 1506MHz. This has ended in a lift pace of at least 1708MHz, while GPU Boost three.zero will push that even higher. When gaming, the frequency was regularly seen soaring around 1772MHz but did drop down to 1734MHz at times.

Galax had to sacrifice a few show outputs because of the Katana's single-slot layout. Here we've just a unmarried DisplayPort 1.four output (it would be common to discover 3 of those on a GTX 1070), as well as one HDMI 2.0b and DVI-D connector. If you could put all of those outputs to apply then the card supports 3 presentations concurrently.

On to the Benchmarks...

Our Kaby Lake Core i7-7700K take a look at gadget became clocked at four.9GHz and we examined the GTX 1070 Katana both in its default configuration in addition to with a custom overclock which driven the card to a 1719MHz base clock and 2202MHz at the reminiscence facet, or a 13% increase on the previous and 10% on the latter. This overclock ended in an actual running frequency of 1949MHz whilst gaming, although we did have to force a fan velocity of 80% and this made the card pretty loud. Anyway, to the results...

As expected, the GTX 1070 Katana turned into a few frames slower than the beefier dual and triple-slot 1070s from Palit, Gigabyte and Asus. That said, out of the container the overall performance changed into still respectable as the Katana sat some frames beforehand of Nvidia's Founders Edition 1070. Rendering a mean of 90fps in Battlefield four at 1440p on extremely fine is not anything to sneeze at, specifically for a single-slot card.

We found much the same in Far Cry Primal: the Katana changed into capable of exceptional the Founders Edition at the same time as it's just a body or two behind the bigger accomplice card fashions. Something we have yet to factor out is how well the card plays as soon as overclocked. It's not going to overcome an overclocked twin-slot card of direction, however hitting 68fps on this test turned into surprising all of the identical, even supposing the card was a little loud.

Star Wars Battlefront does not offer something we haven't visible already so I'll wrap up the benchmarks here and take a look at out the cardboard's strength consumption and operating temperatures...

Besides wondering that it'd run hotter and louder than most GTX 1070s, I wasn't positive what to anticipate from the Katana's overall performance in this class so I turned into pleasantly surprised via the cardboard's 82 degree end result, which became a degree underneath the Founders Edition card in spite of imparting slightly higher performance. Of notice, the card wasn't too noisy out of the field but preserving that eighty two levels after our overclock required us to growth the fan velocity to a quite loud placing.

For those thinking, I checked floor temperatures with an infrared warmness gun and found the shroud towards the center of the cardboard to be a incredibly cool forty four stages. The outlet where the new air exits the card hit a 56 tiers.

When it came to power consumption, the Katana used only barely more than the Founders Edition model and even once overclocked it still pulled much less strength than custom board partner cards out of the field.

Wrap Up

There you've got it: a unmarried-slot snap shots card that still gets the task completed, supplying a chunk more performance than Nvidia's Founders Edition GTX 1070 while going for walks a degree cooler and occupying one less enlargement slot. While we are inspired with the aid of the Galax GTX 1070 Katana, it's not a complete shock to be testing a card of this nature thinking about they may be now cramming GTX 1070 and 1080 GPUs into laptops.

Pricing is currently set at $420 while purchasing immediately from Galax's US keep, although that won't be smooth as it's out of stock. Although the most inexpensive 1070s are promoting for around $370 right now, this is the most effective unmarried-slot 1070 you'll find, so it's hard to whinge about the premium over a popular dual-slot version. Even so, as soon as the Katana's availability improves, its fee likely will too.

Overall, I determined the card's operating temperature and volume to be ideal, out of the field overall performance became top notch and the cardboard itself looks smart. For those searching for a narrow excessive-stop portraits cards, there is definitely no higher desire -- I bet you could say it truly is due to the fact there's no different preference, so thankfully this one assessments out.

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Pros: Only occupies one growth slot and simplest calls for one slot among Katanas. Runs a chunk cooler and quicker than the GTX 1070 Founders Edition.

Cons: Operates warmer, louder and a barely slower than custom twin-slot GTX 1070s. Pricing seems fair but remains $50 extra than present day cheapest 1070s.