If you're a small form factor enthusiast, you probably have struggled to find a highly performant GPU that
isn't a stupidly large size. Even the
5070 Founders Edition, which in today's standards is a pretty small card, ain't
even that small. It's still two whole slots, and it's long. It's too long for
this beautiful little case. Thankfully, Colorful has answered our prayers and
has brought us the 5070 iGame [music] Mini.
A very short, delightful,
little single-fan GPU.
And it's a 5070, and it's got a a
weird box. Looks like a creeper's legs.
Inside of the box, we have our documentation, quick start guide, as
well as QC. And here is the GPU itself.
Oh, it's got some heft to it. Okay, it's small, but it's not light. And just
taking a look on the outside, it's because the vast majority of this is pretty
dense heatsink. Probably going to be essential because
this is such a small card. In fact, as I've become more used to seeing like
triple-slot behemoth heatsinks on top of 5070s, it feels like this really
shouldn't work. But let's compare it to the Founders Edition, which is kind of
one of the smaller cards on the market. Compared to the Founders Edition, the
iGame Mini is substantially shorter, but maybe a little bit taller. It maintains
the same two-slot thickness and is actually [music] like just barely
thinner than the Founders, but not in a way that would matter for pretty much
any configuration. In terms of the type of cooler, while the 5070 Founders Edition has the same
look as the double-flow through coolers found on the higher-end GPUs, it
actually is only flow through on the one side, and this goes directly into a
board that's got this big. And you can actually see the boards are of similar size, but it
probably doesn't have the same striking V cutout that you'll see on the board of
a Founders Edition. However, we can see that it's [music] very technically a
flow through right at this edge,
where you can see just a little bit through the heatsink. And if you look from this edge, you can kind of see the
cutout in the board there. So, this isn't just a square GPU.
They say it's OC, which I think is kind of surprising when you're using [music]
such a small card to go with an OC model, but
it's an OC in name only because they're adding 45 MHz to the boost clock and
nothing to the base clock. It's basically not OC'd.
And it's not going to perform any faster. Well, we'll talk about performance in a little bit. But in
general, it's a RTX 5070 that has 6,144
CUDA cores, 192 [music] fifth-gen tensor cores, 48 fourth-gen ray-tracing cores,
and it's got 12 GB of GDDR7 VRAM, access
to NVIDIA's NVENC encoders, and
has a TDP or TGP, I don't know. They all have a dumb word. Basically, it's
supposed to pull 250 W. More or less. They recommend a 650 W
power supply with this, and it connects via a 12-V 2x6 connector.
In terms of your display outputs, you get the same as you'd find on the Founders. That's three a DisplayPort
2.1b and one HDMI 2.1.
And at the end of the day, it is just another [music] 5070. We're going to put
it in a system, and then we're going to talk about performance, but first, we're
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and save 15%. In terms of aesthetics, I
think it's kind of interesting that they went with like this very slightly sparkly aluminum. And we got some shiny
sheen on our iGame [music] Mini.
I think it's honestly pretty
tasteful for a lot of gaming cards. There's not a whole lot you can do in
terms of style when you're trying to just really make sure that you're cooling something well. I do wish that
we didn't have this ugly GeForce RTX
non-addressable RGB logo. There is actually addressable RGB on the card,
but it's only this mini logo. I'm not too worried about RGB. I like my
computers to be silent and unseen. That's why I like um small form factor,
so I can tuck it away somewhere else and not have to have this big honking thing
on my desk. Let's get this in.
I've been an advocate of thinking moving the power connectors up here
cuz I think it's always it's always sucks when you're just like, "Oh, here's this beautiful GPU." And it's like this
honking huge cable, especially for high-power GPUs. Well, now with the uh
600-W uh 12-V high-power connectors,
it's not as big of a deal. It's just that you that you know, the trade-off is
your house might burn down. Is there another model of 5070 or 5080 that would
fit in this case? Like, this is probably
the only 5070 that fits in this case that I can think of. All of them are
typically much longer and larger, so
if you want to build in this case and have a relatively high-power GPU, this
is literally your only choice. And here we are in a running system.
Though it doesn't really look like it's running because it has a zero RPM fan
mode, and also it looks like that RGB was either a lie or requires us to
install the drivers, which if you if you would leave one
>> [music] >> negative comment about not seeing the RGB on this GPU,
I quit. So, the RGB isn't working because you need to download the iGame
Mini software, which um I'd probably skip and just stick to the
normal NVIDIA drivers for controlling the fans. Uh you're not getting that
much ARGB, [music] so you're not really missing out on much. But look at how cute it is.
But the looks don't matter if the frame rate sucks. So, let's see if this tiny
form factor is compromising performance. In terms of gaming performance, well,
it's a 5070, and it's barely overclocked, so it performs
pretty much identically to the FE in every single game at any resolution. If
you want to get more depth on these results, feel free to head over to the Labs article. We'll have that linked in
the description. But you can feel contented knowing that you're not
sacrificing gaming performance, which bodes well for potential thermal
performance. Now, when we look at these cool little scans that we got of the
GPU, we can see that it's four heat pipes on it. It really reminds me a lot
of the low-profile CPU coolers from the likes of like Noctua or be quiet, um
which makes sense cuz it's basically a low-profile small cooler. And
apparently, it's doing the trick. It's actually doing a better job at
managing GPU temperatures than the 5070.
What you might worry about would be your hotspot temperatures on your GPU, but
NVIDIA doesn't give us access to hotspot temperatures anymore, so we have to take
[music] the GPU temp at face value here. And in
our Combuster heat stress test, we can see that the Mini is actually [music]
cooling better than the FE version, which is crazy. By like a wide margin,
like 5°. And
we're seeing that at relatively similar clock speeds and [music] similar power
draws with our PCAT. I'm honestly really surprised. I would expect it to perform
thermally worse. Basically, whether it's a synthetic workload, a productivity
workload, or gaming workload, this thing is going to be thermally fine. However,
we don't know if that comes at the cost of sound.
Because you can cool a lot of stuff by just making those fans rip. So, let's
get into a game. If we get If we pair all the sensors, I can turn the other
fans down and just let it really throttle. Uh they put a 13900K in this
PC for some reason and gave it the dinkiest of dinky coolers.
Um But I put this in the system cuz I wanted to hear how loud the GPU [music]
is. So far, doesn't seem that much worse than the
absolutely screaming case fans because
where CPU's pinned at 100°C.
Cuz we put it 350-W CPU on
a 65-W cooler. Okay, did the CPU fan go fully off? I
think it did. Okay, we're going to turn that back up. We're going to get that one up a little bit. But basically,
right now, we you're not hearing any fan noise from the case fans. This is all
just the GPU running about 30%.
And we're in Cyberpunk at 4K with DLSS on, I think, medium.
It's performing well, and the GP temps are 85, and that's with like it being
relatively quiet. It's definitely not as silent as like a larger heatsink CPU
would be. And if we go up to like 100,
that's pretty quiet for 100.
And like honestly, like it's not an annoying whine like a lot of loud GPUs
get. Maybe it's because of the enclosure that we're in.
You know, it's Wow, that's a lot of heat coming out of there.
We're probably seeing our thermal performance actually hindered by this case's design. Like, our fan's pulling
air from this far side of the GPU, where there's very little ventilation that
isn't it just trying to kick out that own exhaust. There's not a lot of pull in there. It would perform better with
something that has more direct access to
fresh air. And that's probably why we're seeing like 10-ish degrees more than what we
saw on the bench. Sound wise, though, if that's 100%,
that's really not that bothersome.
So, I wouldn't really be all that worried. We died.
I think the CPU overheated. Most form small form factor cases tend
to be very concerned about GPU airflow and do their best. You will usually find
that a GPU will performing worse in a small form factor case compared to a
larger case, but this seems like a particularly problematic enclosure.
But yeah, if this is at 100% which is probably rarely going to run at
unless it's really, really, really running hot,
honestly, that's pretty good.
It makes a triple slot like massive 570 just kind of look
embarrassing. Cuz I mean like you just got this tiny guy, but here's the issue.
It's the price. This thing, also not widely available in
North America, we had to import this bad boy, is selling for about 5,199
yuan or $738,
which is a heck of a lot more than the $509
that is already probably too much for a 570, which sucks because this is like
[music] the only thing like this on the market. So, I think I hope that they are
able to drive enough sales to show that there is an actual audience, people who
want this kind of tech, because man, this thing's sick.
I'm tired of stupid big GPUs.
But you know what I'm not tired of? You. Thanks for watching this video. If you
enjoyed this, why don't you watch one of our other GPU videos? I don't know. What
about the 5080 roundup if you want to see some stupid big ones?