Galax GeForce 1070
Rock solid build quality and value
PRICE $ 575 www.galax.com
Once associated with budget products for those scraping the bottom of their bank accounts, Galax has successfully morphed into a brand that is now associated with higher quality products. They’ve done so without breaking the bank, delivering innovative features and top-tier performance at a very reasonable price.
This graphics card is one such example. The price is extremely competitive, one of the most affordable on the market in fact, yet Galax hasn’t scrimped on the quality. The fact that it has a beautiful white finish will be enough to get many people interested, but Galax has given it more than just a mere paint job.
A 5+2 ( five for core, two for memory), which is a generous boost over the default five phase power found in the default Nvidia design. Feeding this is a single six-pin plus single eight-pin power connector, and Galax recommends a minimum PSU of 500W due to the 150W TDP of this card. Everything is cooled by two huge 100mm fans, which measured a mere 46dB under load during our testing. An aluminium back plate keeps everything from sagging, but Galax warns that this could be an issue mounting it; owners will need to ensure there’s a gap of 4mm or more between the PCIe slot and RAM or I/ O heatsinks. This same backplate is where Galax houses the RGB lighting, but in comparison to other cards, the RGB solution is relatively basic.
As expected, a factory overclock is in place, with the top speed of 1784MHz being a decent boost over the 1683MHz
one of the most affordable on the market, yet Galax hasn’t scrimped on quality
of the default Nvidia GTX 1070. However, we saw speeds approaching 2GHz during our benchmarking, delivering performance almost on par with a GTX 1080. Not too shabby. This card comes with the usual 1070 output options, being a single DVI-D, Single HDMI 2.0a and three DisplayPort 1.4 outputs.
Our benchmarks show that the GTX 1070 powering this card is more than capable of most of today’s triple A games, though it’s aimed at the 1080p crowd. There are still games that can challenge it even at 1080p though, with the likes of Ghost Recon Wildlands hitting lows of 43fps with everything maxed out, which isn’t exactly a smooth experience (unless you’ve also got a G-Synch display).
But at this price you can’t expect the world; yet Galax has over delivered considering just how cheap this card is. They could easily have gone with a boring stock design but instead added better power and a sexy paint job, all while making it one of the most affordable GeForce GTX 1070s on the block. BENNETT RING