Many people yearn for a small form factor PC, especially one that can pack a good amount of performance into a space the size of a shoebox. These days, though, it's pretty hard to get around the TDP requirements of high-end graphics cards.

I was hoping that the single-slot Galax RTX 4060 Ti Unparalleled MAX 16GB would harken back to the glory days of the GeForce 8800 GT, but sadly, the AD106-powered RTX 4060 Ti's TDP of 165W seems to be a bit beyond the norm.

Chinese technology site EXP Review (via harukaze5719) got their hands on one of these interesting cards and did a complete review. The results showed that this card performed almost as well as any other RTX 4060 Ti. This is a good thing, and concerns about thermal throttling seem moot.

In order to maintain the same level of performance as a dual-slot card with a much larger heatsink surface area, the fan needed to be faster, and the load noise level was 51.4 dBA. Assuming that a standard RTX 4060 Ti is around 30 dBA, the single-slot card seems about four times louder, given that the decibel measurement is logarithmic.

Not an insurmountable level if you're gaming with headphones on, but high otherwise; at 115W TDP, it's much more manageable than the RTX 4060 Ti's 165W TDP. For comparison, the legendary 8800 GT had a TDP of 125W.

It is unclear when or if this card will be introduced to the market. It may be a China-only release. I expect this card to be expensive as well, given its unique design, in addition to the fact that the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB is already priced higher than the 8GB one. [Perhaps Galax is positioning this card as a budget compute option rather than a gaming card, which would allow more cards to be installed in a desktop or workstation system than otherwise. Another use case is when a large number of video outputs are needed, for example, to power a wall of monitors or TVs from a single compact system.

Therefore, unless you care little about noise levels or your system is in another room, this Galax option is probably not for you. A regular dual-slot cooler, and perhaps a dual-slot low-profile cooler, would provide higher performance and quieter cooling.

What about a single-slot RTX 4060 Galax?