Colorful markets its GTX 1630 card under the Battle Ax name — surely a weapon to strike fear into the hearts of your opponents! If a name was all that was required to con unsuspecting gamers, maybe this would work. But, sorry Colorful, a tough sounding name does nothing to help the underwhelming GPU inside the box.
It's at least a small card, though it still has dual fans. It weighs 539g and measures 219x115x36mm. That's larger than the PowerColor RX 6400, but still small enough to fit in most mini-ITX cases.
The heatsink is milled aluminum, and it's more than sufficient to keep the GPU and memory cool. Judging by temperatures and fan speeds, though, it's not a high quality design. Cooling 75W is basically child's play these days, and throwing two fans and a larger heatsink at the problem represents a brute force approach rather than an elegant design.
The card itself is very barebones, with no lighting or other extras. The red and black plastic cooling shroud is as exciting as it gets, outside of the box artwork. Video outputs consist of one each for DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0, and DL-DVI-D — the last is for anyone still holding on to an older LCD. It would have been nice to get four HDMI/DisplayPort connections instead, since that would have at least provided a potential use case for people looking to cheaply add support for extra monitors.
- MORE: Best Graphics Cards
- MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
- MORE: All Graphics Content