Galaxy GTX 470 GC Overclocking

I found myself excited to look at Xtreme Tuner HD. I haven't actually looked at Xtreme Tuner in the past and figured that with the ability to adjust the voltage on the latest GTX 470, this was going to be a good opportunity to finally take it for a spin.

To be honest, though, it wasn't going to be easy for Galaxy to stand out. MSI Afterburner is tearing it up when it comes to overclocking and after looking at GIGABYTE OC Guru recently it's clear that a company really does have to follow certain steps to make sure the program is friendly to use, while at the same time effective.

To be honest, Galaxy has it in the bag; the software is fantastic. It's small, lightweight and everything is in front of you. The only real issue I have with the program is that everything's quite small. Initially I loaded up Afterburner to set the fan speed to 100%, only realizing later it was available in Xtreme Tuner HD. If I paid a little closer attention initially I would've noticed it, but if the text was just a little bigger it would be nice. Looking above, you can clearly see there's room for it.

While the software does offer the ability to unlock the Shader and core clock, it unfortunately doesn't work. What we find is that the speeds stay at what the Shader clock is, with the core clock following that. We have to wonder if this is a limitation to the models or R&D as MSI, Galaxy and EVGA just haven't been able to get around it.

The last time we overclocked the GTX 470 it was a reference one with reference cooling. With the Galaxy GTX 470 GC already showing us improved cooling numbers, we hoped to see 800MHz on the core, up from the 774MHz OC we achieved before. Willing to accept an even 800MHz, we managed a smidge over that at 803MHz. Unfortunately we didn't have as much luck with the memory, with that coming in at 3932MHz QDR instead of the 4000MHz QDR we achieved in our original article.