News Just In: A Single Slot GTX 470 from Galaxy
by Dr. Ian Cutress on May 19, 2010 8:06 AM EST- Posted in
- Announcing
Power and heat output are often issues which stride the minds of graphics card enthusiasts. Sufficient cooling and a beefy power supply are often a prerequisite if one wishes to invest in NVIDIA’s latest Fermi offering. So what happens when we catch word of a single slot graphics card containing a Fermi GPU?
Hot on the heels of Galaxy’s custom GTX470 GC, the GTX470 Razor (or ‘Katana’ in Japan) is set to be officially launched at Computex 2010, and looks like the bigger brother of the Galaxy GTX260+ Razor, released in September 2009. It is an air cooled, 10 inch long blue PCB, with a fan that draws air in from all sides. Galaxy is utilizing a vapor chamber cooler to better channel heat from the GPU straight to the to the all-copper heatsink and fin assembly in this compact design, with air pushed throughout the assembly and back into the case - not an ideal situation, especially in multi-GPU setups. Requiring a 6-pin and 8-pin power connectors, the card is expected to have NVIDIA specified reference clock speeds, 1280MB of GDDR5 memory across a 320-bit interface, coupled with dual DVI-D and mini HDMI outputs.
With the card being single slot, the fan will have a lot of work to do to keep the card within a reasonable temperature window – on our test of the reference GTX470 design, we saw a load temperature during Crysis of 93ºC, so expect the Galaxy fan to run fast and loud. Also, at a 10 inch length of PCB (0.5 inches over the reference design), a sufficient length case would be required. The single slot nature of the card will in no doubt appeal to folders (who don't mind using an open test-bed), wishing to stick six or seven of them into a single motherboard with a couple of power supplies to boot.
The use of a GTX480 style PCB, in terms of length and power connectors, also gives rise to the potential of a single slot GTX480 in the future. No indication of prices or release date yet, we may receive that information when Computex 2010 opens on June 1st.
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Taft12 - Thursday, May 20, 2010 - link
I guess I admire the engineering required by Galaxy to make this happen, but it was a wasted effort - the market for such a product is what, a few dozen cards worldwide?kallogan - Friday, May 21, 2010 - link
A single slot HD 5670 is already extremely loud compared to a double-slot HD 5770 in idle mode and it only has a 64W TDP. I can't imagine how loud is this GTX 470.JimmiG - Saturday, May 22, 2010 - link
I would be much more interested in a shorter videocard than a single-slot card. I've got room for a six-slot cooler if that's what Nvidia needs for their next card, but even my Radeon 4850 is almost touching the hard drives...dananski - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link
I don't mind having a huge graphics card with a big cooler - there's plenty of room inside my case. I just have these annoying easy-release mechanisms on the card slots on the case that get in the way and stop me from putting in any card with a double-slot backplate.For my current graphics card, I put on a backplate I salvaged from an older, broken, single-slot card, which has worked out fine, but that won't fit on the newest cards.
I don't suppose anyone here knows where sells graphics card backplates?
Samurninsai - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
The slot brackets should be sold by the crad makers but im not sure that all card makers do this. I found last night that EVGA does sell them for the GTX 480/470 on site. I dont know that I would try to use it for this card but I guess you could try.killerb255 - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 - link
This is good for BTX cases where the video card gets mounted in reverse.In those cases (i.e.: any Dell Optiplex 3xx or 7xx case), there's no slot to use for the other half of the card. The HSF on double-slotted cards tends to run into the northbridge heat sink and other components on BTX motherboards.
Samurninsai - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
This is a good thing as im thinking i will only use single slot cards with liquid cooling. Almost all other GTX 400/500 cards are dual slot and the expansion plate is too so this will help make things easy.Samurninsai - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
This is a good thing for liquid cooling as im thinking of only using single slot liquid cooled cards. I hope to see more of these in the future such as gtx 570 or gtx 560. Good sli liquid cooled choise.I plan a -------> Asus Rampage 3 Gene with intel core i7 950 liquid cooled and 2 gtx 500 liquid cooled dual loop. I want this to happen.
Samurninsai - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
The slot brackets should be sold by the crad makers but im not sure that all card makers do this. I found last night that EVGA does sell them for the GTX 480/470 on site. I dont know that I would try to use it for this card but I guess you could try.