I’m an old man. I’ve created many an autoexec.bat and config.sys file in my life, vividly remember plugging in my first 3D accelerator card with pass-through cables through a Matrox Mystique GPU, and have benchmarked practically every graphics card released since 2006. And the appearance of this gorgeous new Galax graphics card (via Videocardz) this morning was like snorting a hit of pure nostalgia, bringing all those memories flooding back.
Now I’ve gotten over the stabbing reminder that my brief youth has utterly gone— and that I am tumbling inexorably, and ever more rapidly towards the end—I can take some comfort in the fact that the spiritual successor to one of the best graphics cards ever made is coming. And I just hope I can find someone at Galax to send us one to play with.
The best graphics card ever is, obviously, the Nvidia GeForce 8800GT (fight me). It’s a single-slot beauty of the like I feared I’d never see again. It was affordable, punched above its weight class, and was a sleek card at a time when dual-slot was becoming the norm. And only its mild refresh, the 9800 GT, followed it up.
Now Galax has listed its GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Unparalleled Max on its China site, and I really hope it’s getting a wider launch. But it’s probably not. After all, Colorful (the owner of the Galax brand) has created this single-slot version, and it still hasn’t seen any sort of global release. Still, with two GPU brands theoretically listing them the chances may have increased just a little.
To be entirely fair to the venerable 8800 GT, the RTX 4060 Ti isn’t in the same league. If that had launched with RTX 3070-level gaming performance at a price considerably below the RTX 3060 Ti, then maybe it would have been, but this generation of graphics cards hasn’t been the most consumer friendly, it has to be said.
It is the 16GB variant that Galax/Colorful has given the single-slot treatment. Which does at least solve the limited 8GB issue we had with the original card. Though it is still rocking a 128-bit bus and an 8x PCIe 4.0 interface.
Anyways, why would you actually want a single-slot graphics card with a blower style cooler on it? For one thing, it gives you the chance to stick gaming capable graphics power into a slimline PC chassis—one we would have called a Home Theatre PC (HTPC) in the long, long ago—for another, you could slap a host of them into a single consumer board to deliver workstation-class GPU compute power.
That is reportedly one of the reasons Nvidia isn’t a big fan of companies sticking blower fans on its graphics cards, and why we’ve only really seen that happen outside of the US and Europe. There have been RTX 4090 cards with blower fans on them, specifically for that reason. And we’ve never seen them over here.
Or you could just put this wee thing into your gaming PC and marvel at how slim it is. And make sure to put on a good gaming headset because that thing’s not going to be quiet. Though the RTX 4060 Ti, even at full load, is not a hot or power hungry GPU, it has to be said.