ranzware
If there’s one thing this GPU generation has done thus far, it’s turn me into a lover of all things previous-gen. Oh, to be living in early 2024 when prices were only somewhat expensive and stocks at least existed. So, I can’t help but being more excited at seeing a lovely-looking little RTX 40-series card like this one than the next new RTX 50-series or RX 9060-series card.
This is the Zephyr GeForce RTX 4070 Sakura Snow X, as shown off on BilliBilli (via VideoCardz). And yes, that’s a Chinese video site because, unfortunately, it looks like this might be a China-only card, for now at least.
It’s also not the first we’ve seen of the single-fan RTX 4070 Sakura, as Zephyr launched one last year, and before that there were single-fan concoctions for other cards such as the Zephyr Sakura & Snow GeForce RTX 3060.
This new one is slightly bigger than last year’s, has a bigger fan, and ditches the pink and purple colour scheme for a white and silver one, which will arguably have broader aesthetic appeal.
It comes in at just 178 mm x 128 mm, and what’s especially nice about it—to my eyes, at least—is that the I/O bracket forms a cohesive part of the shroud, which is another difference between this version and the first. It looks incredibly smart.
If you’re like me, however, you’ve probably already noticed that the fan is off-centre, which doesn’t bother me with larger cards, but with one so small my mind is screaming at me: Why are you not central? I know, I know, it’s probably placed right above the GPU, but that does little to hush my perfectionist inner demon.
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The card is, of course, designed to fit in Mini-ITX builds, even though it’s actually a dual-slot card. And I suppose you wouldn’t have to shrink a card down to a single-fan form factor for that to be the case, but every little helps when you have little space to work with in your build.
The slight increase in shroud and fan size from last year’s version, judging from the screenshots shown in the company’s Billibilli video, shows a slight reduction of temperature during a FurMark stress test compared to last year’s version.
Every little helps with a card so… little, I suppose. If this card makes its way to the western market, it looks like a solid choice for SFF system builders, and the RTX 4070 is still a pretty decent performer in today’s games. There certainly aren’t many RTX 50-series alternatives for SFF builds outside of the impossible to find FE cards right now, and with prices as they are, opting for a previous-gen card might not be an awful idea anyway.
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Kurt Indovina
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