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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just4U - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
While cards may be able to run at these temperatures it seems to me that their longevity might be a cause for concern. Also it's likely to increase the overall ambiant temperature in the case so I am always leary about the single slot cooler design on cards that typically need something better.We saw it with the 8800GT, the 3850, and so forth.. If the card warrants a bigger beefier cooler I'd like to see it on there as I won't even consider buying it otherwise.
ATC9001 - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
Other than your mere opinion that hot cards will die quicker, do you have any justification on hot cards dying sooner? I agree they may die sooner...but how about quantifying that...the card dies in 50 years as opposed to 100? 10 instead 12? I've not heard of video cards dying or artifacting randomly in a long time so a mere heuristic is they're getting better.And your case gets hotter with this card? If anything it's designed to run at lower voltages to keep power down. A 100 watt card will put out 100 watts of energy regardless if it has a massive 5 lb heatsink or 5oz heatsink.
DanNeely - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
Electromigration is a common killer of older chips, and since it's (among other things) thermally dependent hotter chips will die from it faster.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration#Ther...
The0ne - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
Common sense tells you DON'T run things too hot or they will die on you, quick! You don't have to be an engineer to understand this.just4U - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
Act,I build aproximately 50 computers a year.. give or take. I've seen my fair share of video card related problems because of that. Usually to do with shoddy fans, or just overall poor cooling designs. I'd say a good 20% of cards that sent up alarm bells with their heat died out (on me) just over a year in.. Or caused untold problems that led to them being replaced fairly quickly. Because of this, I've learned to be a little distrusftull of cards heading up past 75 degrees and I really don't care what the documentation says.
Per Hansson - Thursday, May 20, 2010 - link
Capacitors are rated to run at a specified temperature at up to a specified number of hours before their properties detoriateA common high quality capacitor will be rated for example 105°C and 2000 hours
That means that it would take much less than a year to cook it!
Now every time you reduce the temperature 10° you double the life expectancy (roughly)
And hopefully they put the capacitors well enough in an airstream and used high quality models
However I've replaced so many dead capacitors on mainboards and graphics cards that I'm not holding my breath!
But hey; it gives me stuff to work on so I don't complain!
iamezza - Thursday, May 20, 2010 - link
From my experience video cards are one of the more common PC components to die. It's very rarely the GPU itself but other components on the card like capacitors or VRMs etc. While the GPU itself can probably handle 90 degrees C for many long years the other components really don't like the massive amounts of heat they get being so close to the GPU.SlyNine - Friday, May 21, 2010 - link
Yea, 2 EVGA 8800GT's, The told me it was rated to run at the 105C. Both had to be returned 3 times until I decided to put on an after market cooler. No problems since. Thanks to EVGA's policies they are still fully under warrenty.SlyNine - Friday, May 21, 2010 - link
But, That sealed it for me. I will never get an egg cooking videocard ever again. When the heat is warping the PCB boards what do you expect to happen when the heatsynk starts pulling away from the GPU. It was one part of the problem for the Xbox360.sdolson - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
I suppose it'll be interesting to see how hot it actually runs. In my case, I'm not overly concerned about venting the heat back into the case, because the CPUs are water-cooled. If I got a Fermi card or two, I could water-cool them too, but something like this might be a good alternative (depending on heat and sound issues).