The Card

Having a look at the card now and the first thing you have to notice is the massive heatsink that Galaxy has implemented which manages to cover just about every speck of PCB. What's worth noting is that this particular tri-fan cooler isn't the same one we've seen from the company in the past; it's a bit smaller as far as fans go and it doesn't take up three slots like the other one, making it more suited for this model which doesn't sit as high up as the GTX 295 and GTX 275.

If we look closely at the front we can see the aluminum fins in the background along with a bunch of copper that helps move the heat away from the core as quick as possible. Looking across the top of the card we can also see the six heat pipes exiting and entering the card.

Looking at this angle of the card we can see two 6-pin PCI-E connectors located at the back. Next to these connectors we can also see a spot for the S/PDIF loopback cable in the event you want to make use of HDMI.

Closer to the front of the card we have our two SLI connectors. Here we can also see a black bar, designed to prevent the PCB from bending. It does a good job of making the card look a bit meaner as well.

In the I/O department we can see some big holes at the top which help the hot air escape. Below that we can see that Galaxy has mixed it up a bit. Apart from just including the standard TV-Out port and Dual-Link DVI connector we can also see the company offers a HDMI port native to the card, which is always nice.

Specifications

As we've mentioned Galaxy has chosen to overclock the card. What we can see is that the core has moved from the stock 576MHz to 625MHz which has in turn moved the shader clock from 1242MHz to 1350MHz.

We can also see that the 896MB of GDDR3 memory has moved from 1998MHz DDR to 2100MHz DDR. It's nice to see that Galaxy has chosen to not only include an upgraded cooler, but increase the clocks of the card as well.