Galaxy is working on a single-slot graphics card based on the GF100 in its GeForce GTX 470 version. If that didn't boggle your mind, the fact that it's not another card with a water-block, but a single-piece air-cooled card surely will. Enter the Galaxy GTX 470 model known as "Katana" in Japan and "Razor" in other markets. The PCB appears to be a little over 10 inches long, looks-wise makes use of Galaxy's Blue-silver-copper scheme from its other non-reference GTX 470 GC card.

The single-slot air cooler covers the entire length of the PCB, with a fan that draws air from both sides of the PCB, and has grills that reveal the cooler's internal network of copper air-channels, and a slab of copper that is spread across most of the PCB's area that holds the GPU and memory. The cooler makes use of vapour-chamber technology. The card draws power from 8-pin and 6-pin power connectors. It is 4-way SLI capable. It is expected that the card comes with at least NVIDIA reference clock speeds, all other specifications remain the same: 448 CUDA cores, 1280 MB of GDDR5 memory across 320-bit interface, and connectivity which includes two DVI-D and a mini HDMI. It is expected to deck up Galaxy's Computex booth.

Galaxy is ready with its 100% non-reference design graphics card based on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 GPU, the Galaxy GTX 470 GC Version. The card makes use of Galaxy engineering with both the PCB and cooler designs. The card features a blue PCB, which is 0.5 inch shorter than the reference design (at 9 inches), and pushes the two 6-pin power connectors to the rear-end of the card. The cooling assembly uses a large aluminum fin array cooling all vital parts, covered with a silvery plastic found on action figures. Galaxy innovated a little with the fan, which can be partly detached from the rest of the cooler to help clean it and the heatsink under it.

The card is overclocked out of the box, with speeds of 625 MHz / 1250 MHz / 837 or 3348 MHz (effective), for the core, shader, and memory, respectively. Like every other GTX 470 based card, it is DirectX 11 compliant, and has 448 CUDA cores, 1280 MB of GDDR5 memory across a 320-bit wide interface, and is 2/3/4-way SLI capable. Display connectivity includes two DVI-D, and HDMI with integrated audio. A test by the source shows that with this cooling solution, the GTX 470 GC Version manages to keep the GPU at around 88 degrees Celsius with Furmark load. It is expected that the card will be available in the US as early as by tomorrow.

NVIDIA released its latest version of the GeForce driver suite, version 197.55, specific to the GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards. The WHQL-signed drivers don't announce any more changes than a major feature change - official support for 4-way SLI on both GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470. The drivers only work with GeForce 400 series products. No Release Notes documents were published along with the drivers.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 197.55 WHQL for Windows 7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 7/Vista 32-bit

Soon after EVGA laid its hands on stocks of GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards, it claims from an internal test that 4-way SLI is possible on the reference design GTX 480 graphics cards. The GTX 480 was advertised to work with up to two more of its kind in 3-way SLI, in NVIDIA's presentations to the press. EVGA's feat of running four GTX 480 cards was possible on its X58 Classified 4-way SLI motherboard, which has room for four graphics cards, and a special SLI bridge that connects to four NVIDIA graphics cards with two SLI interconnect bridges each. EVGA released a special-edition GeForce GTX 285 4-way SLI ready graphics card to go with the motherboard.

The EVGA X58 Classified 4-way SLI isn't the only motherboard to support 4-way SLI, the recently released EVGA Classified SR2 also ships with the special SLI bridge. No other motherboard vendor released a 4-way bridge, yet. EVGA demonstrated the 4-way SLI setup with a run of Unigine Heaven, although it did not give away any performance numbers. 4-way SLI is not to be confused with Quad-SLI, which is also a four-GPU SLI configuration, but involves a 2-way SLI connection between two dual-GPU graphics cards (such as GeForce 9800 GX2, GTX 295, MARS). Any SLI-supportive motherboard supports Quad-SLI.