The Card

Moving onto the card, we can see Galaxy has opted to go with the Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme cooler which packs three 92mm fans. If you look carefully behind the fans you can not only see a number of aluminum fins but also the copper heat pipes that help keep the core as cool as possible.

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We can see that Galaxy have added their own sticker to the fan with their website URL, but apart from that there isn't much else to see due to how large the cooler is. We can see that it covers just about every bit of the PCB. As for the thickness of it, the cooler does take up just over two slots, so making use of the third slot on your motherboard may be a bit of an issue. For some it's going to be a deal breaker; for others it's not going to matter.

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Towards the back of the card we have two power connectors, one a 6-Pin and the other an 8-Pin. Also back here we can see another small connector that is used in conjunction with the S/PDIF loopback cable so that you can get sound along with video through the HDMI port.

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Closer to the front of the card we have two SLI connectors; due to the size of the cooler, though, you're probably going to find it a bit difficult to use this if your second card needs to go into the third slot on the motherboard.

(Click the above image for the large version)

Looking at the front of the card, we can see that Galaxy have again decided to mix it up. While we have the standard S-Video TV Out port and Dual Link DVI port, they have also taken the time to include a HDMI port natively on the card. This just makes using HDMI connectivity a lot cleaner without the need to have a connector hanging off the back of your card.

Specifications

Opting for such a mean looking cooler, it doesn't come as any surprise that Galaxy has taken the time to overclock the card. Below we can see that the core has been increased from the stock 633MHz to 648MHz; this has in turn increased the shader clock from 1404MHz to 1476MHz.

As for the 896MB of GDDR3 memory, that has been increased from 1134MHz or 2268MHz DDR to a more rounded 1200MHz or 2400MHz DDR. This overclock should result in a nice little increase in performance.