Price and Availability
The GALAX GeForce GTX 1070 KATANA comes with a retail price of $419.99 at the time this review was published. You can order one from GALAX’s official online store at http://galaxstore.net/. It’s not the cheapest GTX 1070 around, but it’s not the most expensive as well.
GALAX GTX 1070 KATANA Review: Conclusion
There you have it guys; you have seen the results and the GALAX GeForce GTX 1070 KATANA performs just like any other GTX 1070 in the market. Of course, it’s understandably not the fastest GTX 1070 around due to its limited cooling capability, but it’s still a GTX 1070 no less. You can get better boost clock speed if you manually increase the fan speed higher; giving you more headroom and a few more frames per second.
The GTX 1070 KATANA is unique indeed, as it’s the first and probably the only single-slot GTX 1070 in the market. Considering how limited the space on this card is, I’m not surprised that it would reach around 80° degrees Celsius under full load, and I think it’s just acceptable. However, I was surprised that it can get as low are 36° degrees Celsius when in idle to light load situations. I was expecting that its idle to light load temperatures would be somewhere around 40° degrees Celsius and up.
Aesthetically speaking, the graphics card looks okay to me. It doesn’t have any LED lighting, nor back plate, and the color is neutral looking. It’s not the most beautiful GTX 1070 on the market, but the main selling point here is that it’s a single-slot GTX 1070; and it’s the only single-slot GTX 1070 in the market. This is definitely going to be a niche graphics card as not many would need a single-slot card on their gaming system. I think small form factor, or slim form factor enthusiasts and system builders would benefit from the design of the GTX 1070 KATANA.
I don’t find any faults or things to complain about on the GTX 1070 KATANA. The warmer temperature, slightly slower performance compared to other dual-slot GTX 1070 and more audible fan noise is expected considering the (very) limited space and cooling capability. If I have to nitpick on something, I think it would be the fan header that is exposed. I think it would look better if it was hidden behind the cooler shroud.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a GTX 1070 Founders Edition on hand when we tested the KATANA. So I can’t comment which one is better in terms of performance and temperature. However, the GTX 1070 KATANA does have a slightly higher clock speed out of the box. Theoretically speaking, it would perform slightly better compared to the Founders Edition.
Finally, the GALAX GeForce GTX 1070 KATANA is a solid performing graphics card and I believe the company was able to balance things well. If ever you are in need of a high performance single-slot (GTX 1070) graphics card for your build, GALAX got you covered with their GTX 1070 KATANA. Now the next question would be, will we see a KATANA version of the GTX 1080 or GTX 1080 Ti soon?
