Hot Flat man: KFA2 / Galax GTX 1070 Katana in test

And no, it's not a flat joke that Galax / KFA2 presents to us here in the form of the GeForce GTX 1070 Katana. Speaking of Katana: This name is now almost a running gag, because you can find Katana or Shinken (not ham!), so d... The board at a glance If you remove the cooler, we see a very short board with 17.3 cm, in which all voltage transformer ranges have been consistently changed to the left side, while the memory is top or bottom. below and to the right of the... The cooler in detail The light metal radiator cover is held in a gun metallic look, sits above the actual radiator block and also covers the black plastic chamber of the protruding radial fan part on the front side. Since the slot panel is... Foreword to the benchmarks The following benchmarks are based on the results of our roundup for the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 and, for better comparability, the correspondingly frozen image of our test... Overview of power consumption and voltages We quickly remember the history with the 90°C passage in the closed housing, as well as the Throttling in the open structure and now look at the direct juxtaposition of the Leistun... Temperatures and clock rates Now we close the circle again to what we had written on page 3 about the optimizations. Since power consumption and GPU temperatures were very similar to the gaming loop and the stress test (with this very... Speeds before and after the change Now let's look at the fan speeds before and after our small, surgical intervention. Even if they should have been lower with the original BIOS, the fan speeds in the 90°C... Summary Yes, physics is a serious science, not a stretchy field of activity of modern utopians. And so the same restrictions apply to single-slot cards as we have known for years. If you accept that for yourself...

Speeds before and after the change

Now let's look at the fan speeds before and after our small, surgical intervention. Even if they should have been lower with the original BIOS, the fan speeds in the 90°C range are beyond good and evil. Only when the card runs to the 83°C limit, the speeds remained moderate. Only then only 1519 MHz are attached and the card is starving itself at 112 watts of power consumption a branch.

The new settings (blue curve) provide a slightly finer control of the speeds, because the speeds after reaching the 90°C power amplifier with the original settings (yellow curve) are even significantly and above all constantly higher.

Noise emission ("volume") and sound characteristics

This time we have to start with the idle and the idle speeds defined in the BIOS. 43% is simply too much, especially since the fan lays out a relatively low frequency base carpet. The snarling engine noises are clearly audible, especially since they can also be transmitted to the housing via the fixed-screw card. An external fan control then sees the setup with a little less than 34 dB(A) in the advantage, if one were to set 30% as the minimum lower limit when idle.

Let's start by looking at the Worst Case! With the original BIOS, the map, whether with Witcher 3 or Furmark, easily reaches the 90°C mark, which you can hear very clearly. Just under 53 dB(A) are an acoustic torment and nothing for delicately stringed desk stools.

Reason enough, therefore, to improve the fan curve a little. With slightly lower speeds and a lower Power Target, the 50 dB(A) mark can also be easily reached under full load. slightly below. But then at least 10°C less and finally also well below the thermal load limit.

Even the stress test over a longer period of time is handled with flying colours and it hardly gets louder. If you need a flat man, you will have to and can live with this bomb, because you have to respect the natural set.

From this point of view, the Katana is a clean solution, because you will probably never expect an acoustic quiet pedal in this waste heat category. Let's just call it an insight into the physical conditions.

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