Galax has brought out its own addition to add to the growing lineup of small form factor GTX 970s.  The new GTX 970 Black Edition is only 19cm long and packs as much power as a standard sized GTX 970.

Today Galax (aka Galaxy) announced a brand new videocard in its GTX 970 lineup, the GTX 970 Black Edition.  The card is meant to be a small form factor that will be compact enough to fit in many small form factor(SSF) cases.  The card is only 19cm long and has a very nice custom cooler employing twin 80mm fans sitting atop a aluminum fins fed by three heat-pipes.  The card come factory overclocked with a base clock of 1126MHz and a boost clock of 1266MHz.  Galax decided to leave the memory alone as it is running the standard 7GHz memory clock.  The card will be available very shortly for about €320 from a variety of retailers and etailers.

The Nvidia GTX 970 is currently the “it” card of the moment as it is quite frankly the model that provides the best price to performance ratio.  The GTX 970s have been in a constant state of in-stock and out of stock from various sellers due to the popularity.  This has created a lot of frustration for consumers who are wanting to upgrade only to find that it is constantly out of stock, and it becomes a game of check the store for availability.  The fact is that these cards are so powerful and so energy efficient that to be able to build a small form factor build with one of these new cards would be just as powerful as a full sized system.  The small form factor builds are becoming increasingly popular amount enthusiast and with the Intel X99 motherboards coming out in mATX sizes users can now create powerful rigs that take only a fraction of the space as they used to while being more powerful.

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Today is the day that you can get Samsung’s (KRX:005930) new Galaxy Note Edge, the Note Edge is Samsung’s first phone with a curved edge display that allows you to use the side of the phone as a display and as a touch surface, without a doubt an innovative design and product.

We won’t even go into the fact that the phone is well over $100 more than the Galaxy Note 4 or $200 more than the Samsung Galaxy S5, that’s just a product positioning choice. The real problem is the disparity between the prices of the exact same phone between AT&T (NYSE: T), T-Mobile (NYSE: TMUS) and Sprint (NYSE: S) all three of which carry the phone today.

If you go to Samsung’s website, they don’t actually list a retail price of the phone, but rather direct you to the carrier’s website to purchase the device. So, naturally, when we saw that the Galaxy Note Edge was selling for $945.99 on AT&T we were absolutely shocked that Samsung would price a device at such a ridiculous price. But then we decided to investigate further and checked out T-Mobile’s Galaxy Note Edge pricing and found it to be $75.99 cheaper than AT&T even though both devices will work on each other’s networks. But then the real shock came when we checked Sprint’s website and saw yet another retail price, this time for $840, a whole $105.99 cheaper than AT&T’s version which is identical.

Not to mention, AT&T’s phones are generally the most bloated in terms of unwanted software, which means people who are on AT&T not only pay more for their service (since T-Mobile and Sprint are undoubtedly cheaper) but they also pay more for their phones. This is a big deal when you think about it because it means that anyone trying to use AT&T’s next program is getting screwed out of more money than people on T-Mobile and Sprint, in addition to already paying more for their plans. AT&T’s Next program isn’t really a very good program to begin with, but if you add on the fact that they charge an additional $105.99 for their phones, it gets much much worse.

Consumers have a right to know what their phones cost and what prices their carriers are charging them for the device, and unless you actually do some searching you would have no idea you are paying $105.99 more for the exact same phone on AT&T. Sure, AT&T has a better network than Sprint, but that doesn’t justify the $105.99 price premium, and sure there’s a good chance that perhaps Sprint is subsidizing the price of the Galaxy Note Edge to make it more attractive, but we all know they don’t pay retail prices. What’s even more interesting is that Sprint’s on-contract price is $430 for the Galaxy Note Edge while AT&T’s is $399, which likely has to do with the fact that AT&T charges more per month and part of your contract does go to pay off your device. Sprint’s on-contract pricing makes sense, but AT&T’s off-contract pricing does not. Just remember to pay attention to what the phone really costs you.

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This company boasts large number of engineers who specialize in creating custom designs for the numerous OEMs, and PALIT Multimedia itself is the largest manufacturer of Nvidia graphics cards. If you are wondering what’s up with this intro, the answer is quite simple. Back on Nvision 2008, we spoke with the Palit North American team and they shed us some light on the future of the company, and those conversations are now coming to life.

View of the custom card, courtesy of Expreview.com

PALIT plans to offer a lot of custom designs onto the market for both ATI and Nvidia cards, and future designs will be geared towards price flexibility from one side and highest performance from another. The time for custom-time for building GTX260 1.8GB and GTX285 2GB cards is approaching, but that will not be the only change that is coming – PALIT paired up with Danger Den to create a special line of GPU cards, and that will include both ATI and Nvidia ones.

Palit mastered ATI with custom-built triple-slot Radeon  4870X2 (sold by Gainward and Palit), and the time has come for custom-designed Nvidia card with blue PCB, this time branded as Galaxy (Galaxy – blue, Gainward – red, Palit – all of the above ). You can expect a lot of custom designs for high-end cards as well, especially when GDDR5 takes over and enables PALIT to experiment with PCB layout even more (with GDDR3, your hands were tied). Besides PALIT, the only two companies that experiment with custom built high-end cards are ASUS and EVGA.

All in all, 2009 is looking to be a great year for enthusiasts, with some real unique products coming to market. We’re looking forward in seeing custom-design GTX285.

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