My goodness it’s been such a long time since I’ve had the joy of experiencing a slim profile card, the last one was the Galaxy GTX260 Razor – the GALAX GTX 1070 Katana seems to be the successor of this model with a much better cooling system.
So yeah, it is the Katana here and as the name implies it’s as slim as you can get with a graphics card. Look at how the card is sealed from from every side.
And yes, sealed from every side from top to front to bottom, only leaving the rear and some openings as an exhaust.
To keep the card slim it, the GALAX GTX 1070 Katana does not come with any back plate and as you can see the card isn’t big. It’s a GTX 1070 on a small PCB and it only looks long because of the cooler extension to house the blower fan.
Once opened you’ll see how beautiful the card is, just one huge copper block shared by the GPU, Memory chips, VRM and what not. There’s pros and cons in this design, being copper means it absorbs heat very fast but on the down side copper dissipates heat not as good as aluminum.
And what is the card like? Here’s the GPU-Z capture of the card.
Overclocking
The GALAX GTX 1070 Katana is able to run with even +100 Mhz increase on core, and it only failed Ashes of the Singlarity test. I settled with +50 overclock and the card passed all tests.
Benchmarks
Temperature and Power Draw
The GALAX GTX 1070 Katana is impressive, now bear in mind that I’m using Furmark so the load is higher than usual so hitting almost 90c is nothing new, especially for a cooler this small and once the RPM is ramped up it can cool down to low 70s.
And for the sake of this review, I’ve requested 2 units so I can do silly stuff like this!
The Verdict
The GALAX GTX 1070 Katana retails at RM 2,439 and comes with 3 years warranty – it’s not cheap, it doesn’t come with fancy RGB but what you get is a card that doesn’t take up a lot of space.
If you are using a board that has M.2 slot right next to the PCI-E slot, the Katana gives you accessibility to M.2 area.
If for some reason you need to free up PCI-E slots, the Katana allows you to access one additional PCI-E slot compared to 2-PCI-E thickness card. Compared to really thick cards that take up 2.5 PCI-E slots, the Katana frees up 2 slots.
