Galaxy GeForce GTX 470 GC Graphic Card Review

The 1st non-reference Fermi product in the world with Blue LED user serviceable fan? It’s from Galaxy and it’s with us today.

Firstly I would like to apologize to Galaxy and my dear readers for delayed publication of this article (btw, Happy Birthday to goldfries.com! …… well it was 31st May actually. Entering the 4th year of publication!

Now, back to the card.

– The 1st non-reference Fermi product in the world
– Blue LED user serviceable fan
– 9″ PCB on GTX 470 GC
– ” Galaxy Clocked” – overclocking done right
– Up to 11 degrees cooler than reference design
– Up to 4dBA quieter than reference design
– Top quality components – 4 heatpipe, all solid capacitors
– Dual BIOS, XT HD overclocking support
– Shorter than refer GTX470

Those are the key features of the Galaxy GeForce GTX 470 GC.

The Appearance

As you can see it’s not using the reference heatsink.

Here’s the interesting bit – the Blue LED user serviceable fan. The word “BLUE LED” always lead me to think of transparent fan blades but this card uses Galaxy’s signature blue fan but with LEDs in the enclosure.

The reference cooler gives a rather plastic toy feel, the clips were steady but not exactly easy to pry. It’s not difficult, just that it’s very secure thus you may need to use more than 1 hand to open, rather than just the thumb and index finger.

Aluminum fins and copper heatpipes. Lovely.

The fan is silent in general but once it’s on full load – it’s still audible but definitely much more quiet than reference fans.

Card Details

Here’s a summarized detail of the card.

More details at the official product page

The Galaxy GeForce GTX 470 GC – 625 Mhz Core | 837 (3348Mhz DDR) Memory | 1250Mhz Shader
Reference GeForce GTX 470 – 607 Mhz Core | 837 (3348Mhz DDR) Memory | 1215 MHz Shader

While the Galaxy unit is overclock, any experienced graphic card overclocker can tell you that 25Mhz boost for core and 35Mhz boost on shader speed isn’t going to yield a significant boost in framerate. Based on my experience, you’ll probably get a frame or 2 out of it.

Test Setup

The computer setup used for this review.

The Performance

World In Conflict

Graphic Detail : Maximum @ 1680×1050

Lost Planet : Extreme Condition

Graphic Detail : Maximum at 1680 x 946

Crysis

Graphic Detail : Maximum @ 1680×1050

H.A.W.X.

Graphic Detail : Maximum @ 1680×1050, not using DX10.1 for mode.

Battlefield : Bad Company 2

Graphic Detail : 1680×1050, 4xAA, 16xAF, HIGH setting (tested with FRAPS, loading from Campaing #2 – after the intro, up til the save point at town)

Furmark

Graphic Detail : Maximum @ 1680×1050

3DMark Vantage

Setting : Performance

GTX 470 : Expect a GPU score of ~14.000 points, and depending on your system specifications roughly 15.500 points for the overall P score if you are on a fast Core i7 platform.

source : guru3D

Unigine Heaven 2.0

Graphic Detail : 1680×1050, 4xAA, 16xAF, Tesselation at NORMAL.

*Note : I’ve upgraded to Furmark 1.8.2 and have added 3DMark Vantage (and soon, the new 3DMark), Battlefield : Bad Company 2, and also Unigine Heaven 2.0 to the benchmark. Future reviews will include these.

Overclocking

I was curious of the Fermi, especially this one so I tried overclocking using Galaxy’s XtremeTuner HD software and I got the speed up to 700mhz Core | 900 (3600Mhz DDR) Memory | 1400Mhz Shader from the stock that’s 625 Mhz Core | 837 (1674Mhz DDR) Memory | 1250Mhz Shader.

Stunning figures but the results turned out to be lower by a frame or so. 🙁 On a conservative overclock to 675Mhz Core | 860 (1720Mhz DDR) Memory | 1350Mhz Shader, the improvements are less than a frame. Processor bottleneck? I don’t think so either as I’ve even added another 100Mhz to the processor, making it 3.7ghz already and if it was a processor matter then we would’ve seen quite some gains.

Operating Temperature

Furmark was used for graphic card stressing.

Readings were taken when ambient temperature was around 25°C.

– Load, Furmark was run for 1 minute at 1680×1050 with 4xAA.
– Stress, Furmark was run under the Stress Test mode for 5 minutes.

Power Consumption

A little more details on the maximum power consumption of the GTX 470 based cards.

Reference

Conclusion

The reference Galaxy GTX 470 comes to about RM 1,300 so this GC version (based on my observation) should be retailing at RM 1,400 – RM 1,450 range, worth paying the addition RM 100 – 150 or so for those added features.

Just to add – and AMD Athlon II X3 425 is not suffiicent for the GTX 470! Initially the tests were done with the X3 425 and it looked ok but overclocking it to 3.6Ghz shows significant improvement in the results.

The Galaxy GeForce GTX 470 GC is on my rig running full load 24/7 for folding@home and I get like 12.5k points per day (PPD) based on FahMon reports. To my last observation, the card didn’t even go beyond 95°C even when I left the it to fold through the day without air conditioning.

That’s 12.5k for 215w power consumption, going by “points per watt” – it’s way better than 8800GT / 9800GT / GT240. I’ve abandoned my plan to setup a GT240 rig…….. too bad I’ve already ordered the board. 😛 This is a great card and I really recommend it.

If you bring ATI cards into comparison, then clearly any nVidia card out there would prove to provide less value for money. For a person who does folding@home like myself, the nVidia cards are a better option. 😀