Galaxy's GTX470 GC does the trick

Want a video card with funky, sci-fi-tech stylings? Galaxy might just have what you're after...

Aftermarket cooling appears on its face to be a simple affair. Slap on a bigger lump of metal, attach a bigger fan and raise the price accordingly, and call it done. Reality differs somewhat from this idealistic view of what is a real problem - especially when dealing with one of the hottest GPU cores known to man. Galaxy aren't exactly new to the concept of a graphics card, and though the 'GC' edition of their card is slightly overclocked out of the box to 625MHz core (+18), the cooler used doesn't actually appear to be, well, cooler.

Gone is the reference PCB design of a standard GTX470, reworked to fit this new cooler that thankfully chooses to eschew the always slightly-awkward names that heatsinks are given. This new model consists of a large moulded plastic shroud, grey in colour with an array of labels printed on its surface such as "FERMI GPU INSIDE" and "Galaxy engineered detachable cooling system". The latter label is perhaps most interesting as explained below, but the heatsink itself boasts four bare copper heatpipes with widely spaced aluminium fins. Performance isn't that much better than the reference design however; while load temps dropped comparably by six degrees to 82 at a slightly quieter (though still actually very loud) 65.7dBA, idle temperatures were only a degree better at 42 with 60.5dBA - generating an extra seven decibels for essentially the same job.

This is a little disheartening, as we had hoped to get an aftermarket solution with some decent performance benefits, though to its credit it survived running under MSI's Kombustor stress test for a significant period of time quite stably.

Performance in games is exactly where we would peg a GTX470 card with a slight overclock, returning slightly higher frames in both Crysis and GRID that ultimately does very little in the real world. 3DMark Vantage sees a large performance increase to the tune of 1581 points that can be attributed mostly to the new 257.21 driver, and is quite nice. In our updated Unigine Heaven tests (see page 34) we can see the card performing exceptionally well under extreme tessellation loads, and it does quite well without tessellation, too.

Overclocking went quite averagely, increasing a further thirteen per cent on the core to 705MHz (+80) though not increasing the memory speeds at all - quite a far cry from the Inno3D reference version last Issue that clocked to 782MHz on the stock cooler.

It doesn't come with anything particularly compelling in the box, and though there is a nice performance bump due to the factory overclock, the GC will run you a fifty dollar or more premium - which may be fine if you're after a unique card, but we'd suggest you simply grab a reference design and do it yourself.

I'm a swinger, baby
The most novel function of the GC's heatsink, other than cooling marginally better, is that the fan can detach from the top edge of the plastic shroud and swing outwards through roughly 130 degrees of movement. This is supposedly to allow easy access for cleaning out dust which it does admirably, though the clips holding it in place are weaker than an atrophied pinky finger, and it's not a huge stretch to see the fan swinging open when the system is moved. Glows with blue LEDs though.

Oooh, shiny.