The Card

Having a look at the card for the first time you can see that it's clearly more different than the older GTX 295s we're use to seeing. You can mainly thank Galaxy for the decision to use the new single PCB design which now gives us the ability to have a fan smack bang in the middle of the card and cool both cores directly.

In the middle of the fan we have the Galaxy logo, while to the left of the cooler we have the model; in this case it's of course the GTX 295. The right side of the unit doesn't have much going on except for an extension of the pattern that is seen on the left side.

Having a look at the power connectors is where we can see a slight change. While we still see the same single 8-pin and 6-pin setup, both are now on the one side due to there now only being a single PCB.

When it comes to the SLI connector though nothing has changed, we've still only got the single connector that gives us the ability to run up to two of these cards at a single time, this in turn though does give four GPUs though, which is more than any TRI-SLI setup.

In the I/O department one of the first features we see missing is the HDMI port that was native on the older GTX 295 design. While a bit disappointing, it's not the end of the world as Galaxy has chosen to include a convertor in the package. And we still have the two Dual-Link DVI connectors present.

Specifications

If moving to the single PCB design wasn't enough to excite you, we're sure what Galaxy has chosen to do with the clock speeds will. While the standard GeForce GTX 295 core comes in at 576MHz, Galaxy has chosen to ramp this way up to a much more impressive 650MHz. This has in turn bumped the shader clock from 1242MHz to 1401MHz.

If bumping the core wasn't enough for you either, Galaxy has also decided to increase the clocks on the two lots of 896MBs of GDDR3 memory, moving from the default 1998MHz DDR setup we can see that Galaxy have given us a nice bump to 2200MHz DDR. These increases should result in some nice performance gains!