Temperature and Noise Tests



As the PCB was specially designed by Galaxy to enhance the performance of the card, we were quite interested to find out if the extra juice provided by the 6-pin power connector made the card extra hot. Galaxy informed us that they managed to cut down the number of layers on the PCB in order to keep the temperature as low as possible (and reduce manufacturing costs).



As you can see, the card is indeed quite cool. No problems running at overclocked speeds, the Coolermaster copper cooling keeps the card cool. After testing the Sparkle Calibre, I was afraid that this card would turn out to be even louder. We previously found the low profile cooler on the Calibre card too loud for comfort, luckily with the Galaxy noise was not a problem. While we didn’t have a dBA meter at our disposal, so unfortunately can’t provide you with detailed numbers. Subjective opinion is quite positive of the Galaxy as we couldn’t hear it over the stock Intel heatsink of the E2160.

Extreme Overclocking

It’s not every day a manufacturers tells you to go ahead and try to voltmod the product they send you, trying to push their hardware to the limit. We’ve received a green flag to do whatever we can to extract the best performance, so we are getting ready to increase voltage to both GPU and Memory chips.


The chip on the left is for the Vgpu, the chip on the right is for the Vmem.

Note that we will have another article published under our overclocking team “OCTB” with this card under extreme cooling. The Vgpu modification is quite difficult to figure out and we're still working on the project. We have already tried to start the overclock sessions about a week ago, but without the Vgpu modification, we didn't spend too much time on overclocking the card.



Keep an eye on the front page for this overclocking article. Onto our conclusive thoughts ->