Galaxy GeForce GTX 470 GC Video Card

The Card

It's easy to get a bit taken back with the cooler design and its a little bit of a mixed bag. I love the text over it. PSU requirements, mention of Fermi GPU inside and others make it look pretty cool. You can also see bits off copper which give it an overall mean look. Behind the fan is also a blue LED which makes the card look great when up and running.

Where it all becomes a little unstuck is with the quality. It's just plastic and it doesn't feel the best. In saying that, though, it doesn't feel like it's going to break or anything like that. I think the general flimsiness is due to the feature which gives you the ability to pull back the fan.

Pulling back the fan lets you get to the heatsink and the idea is that once a bit of dust is built up you can clean the heatsink quickly, so cooling is at peak performance at all times. It's actually really not a bad idea and when you're in the PC making a few changes or giving a clean-up, a quick dust of the heatsink on the VGA card is a great idea.

There's no denying that this could be done in a sturdier way, however. It's the first time we've seen something like this and it's no doubt going to be a learning curve. This is ultimately the cost of being innovative; you're not going to be able to perfect a new process the first time.

Apart from this, no other surprises are really found on the card with connectivity offering us two Dual-Link DVI ports and a single mini HDMI one.

Specifications

As we mentioned already, Galaxy has chosen to overclock the model. They haven't gone too crazy, though. Galaxy has chosen to leave the 1280MB of GDDR5 memory at the default 3348MHz QDR, but they have bumped the core from 807MHz to 825MHz which also results in the Shader clock going from 1215MHz too 1250MHz.