Chinese manufacturer Zephyr is releasing several new graphics cards, including an RTX 4070 that fits the ITX form factor and has another unique design choice: a single fan.
It uses a single eight-pin power connector with a custom PCB design, an AD104-250 GPU, and 12GB GDDR6X memory. One downside, though, is that it’s not overclocked, and the manufacturer makes no promises about those capabilities.
However, Zephyr makes strong assertions on its heat dissipation effectiveness, claiming that it’s superior to some dual fan cards once it reaches 2400 RPM.
According to the given specs, on average, it’s eight degrees cooler, and the memory temperature is 10 degrees cooler. We don’t know exactly what it’s being compared to, though it could be Zephyr’s two-fan design.
Its performance in the 3DMark benchmark is around the RTX 4070 average, with its score being 4442 compared to the 4450 average.
This could be a major win for the environment
Zephyr’s RTX 4070 single-fan graphics card is, in my opinion, exactly what manufacturers should be working towards. Instead of this constant and unsustainable push for more powerful cards, we should focus efforts on performance efficiency so they use fewer resources to keep them running.
This would especially be vital for data centers, which consume massive amounts of water to remain functional, which has an equally devastating ecological impact. Imagine that, instead of powering these huge centers with Nvidia RTX 5000-series graphic cards that are gearing up to be electricity-guzzling cards further supercharged by AI, you could outfit centers with cards that use way less energy but still provide a comparable performance level to “more powerful” graphics cards.
With the news that the first wave of Zephyr’s RTX 4070s sold out with a second wave planned for mid-July, it seems that gamers clearly want to see more efficient cards as well. This is supported by the fact that people have DIY their own versions of the RTX 4070 Ti to use fewer fans and motherboard slots.
Hopefully, this inspires manufacturers from other countries to refocus their efforts as well, eventually leading to a rapid decrease in wasted resources.
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