The KFA2 GeForce GTX 470 graphics card is an impressive card series alright -- premium is definitely the right label and class for a product of this caliber. See, everything you disliked about the GeForce GTX 400 series is well under control with this product thanks to an optimized PCB and that cooler. Props to the R&D team for the overall design, I mean it is a good looking card, even a notch smaller (9 opposed to 9.5") than reference design. Next to that at all possible fronts features have been improved.

The cooling design works out really well. When the card is under heavy stress you can hear it but that's it, nothing bothersome at irritating levels at all. Meanwhile the GPU temperature under heavy stress will rise to roughly 80 Degrees C, and that's another 10~15 Degrees lower then the reference cards.

Next to that you get the little extra's like dual-BIOS, custom PCB design, even a HDMI cable is included and sure, the detachable fan, though that's more a bit of a gimmick rather than anything else and sure, the standard overclock.

We do feel that the default overclock could have been a good notch higher, this product might come advertised as pre-overclocked, but really it is marginal, so marginal that we had a hard time finding that extra performance in our games. A higher (default) overclock however might be a limitation set by NVIDIA.

Manual overclocking yourself then ... well holy shitzu, with a little extra voltage it's nearly ridiculous how fast we could overclock it. Remember this: a reference GTX 470 is clocked at 600 MHz on the core, we got the KFA2 edition toward 800 MHz on that same core -- 100% stable. Memory is clocked at 3350 MHz at default, but overclocked we reached 4016 MHz. And that does bring the card towards the GeForce GTX 480 level of performance, you'll gain roughly 23~25% additional performance. Overclocking with a voltage tweak does come at a cost though, temperatures will rise upwards quickly as well as the noise levels of the cooling design.

So by releasing this KFA2 branded cards Galaxy manages to impress me. This new EU targeted brand brings a GeForce GTX 470 to the table that runs beautifully and nearly any game to date can be played with it at high monitor resolutions and very stringent image quality settings.

If pricing is set right the KFA2 GeForce GTX 470 will probably sell extremely well and sure, it would deserve that very much as its simply put, a good product. We expect to see the KFA2 GeForce GTX 470 at roughly 324~350 USD/EUR. For that money that you are purchasing a very feature rich graphics card from the current high-end segment, yet with usability, quality and functionality one may expect.

Two big thumbs up to the design team, this product comes very much recommended and is granted our Top Pick award. What a nice release, I am genuinely impressed.

For more info on KFA2, please go here.

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