We rip apart Galaxy's overclocked GTX295 to find out what makes it tick!
The original GTX295 is a phenomenally complex card to put together, as it required two PCBs mounted facing towards each other and a single central heatsink to cool both of them. While the design worked, it wasn't always the best - and ran quite hot while being incredibly laborious to take apart.
This new card from Galaxy solves a lot of those heat issues by moving both the GT200 cores off separate PCBs and cooling them on one side much like the 4870X2. The single-sided PCB design is codenamed P656, but on top of the physical improvements Galaxy has also bumped up the speed of both cores to 650MHz (from 576Mhz stock), and a memory clock increase to 2200MHz from 1998 default.
While the overclocked version of this card isn't available to buy in Australia, the standard version will run you only $645. If you've ever wondered what is inside one of these beasts, well, today is your lucky day! We've got a sample of the card in and rather than let the numbers speak for themselves (here's XFX's reference offering for a slightly slower guess) we took the stock cooler off to see exactly how Galaxy threw it together.
If you're interested in pulling apart your own card keep in mind that it'll void your warranty, but doing so will let you change the stock thermal paste to something a bit better - and you can apply a sane amount of the goop. You'll need only a philips head screwdriver and some patience, but make sure you don't lose any of the screws.
With everything technical about the card pretty much covered, dive into the gallery of pics to see how Galaxy's powerful card is assembled.
Issue: 111 | April, 2010