Tuesday, February 17th 2009
Galaxy Releases GeForce GTX 260+ Non-Reference Card, Changes Cooling Specifications
Galaxy finally pushed its self-designed GeForce GTX 260+ graphics card to retail. The card surfaced earlier this month, in a pre-release appearance with a completely different GPU cooler (read here). The pre-release iteration featured PC-Cooler HP4-1226. As we found out during the course of the discussion, the said cooler was too large to be sold with the card, as it would probably span across four or more expansion slots.
Galaxy made the release-grade card a bit more retail-friendly by using a slightly modified Accelero Twin-Turbo cooler made by Arctic Cooling. The new cooler keeps the footprint of this card within three expansion slots. The Galaxy GeForce GTX 260+ features factory-overclocked parameters, of 625/1350/1050 MHz (core/shader/memory), a 7% overclock over the reference speeds. It uses the 55 nm G200b core, with 216 stream processors and 896 MB of GDDR3 memory. Interestingly, the card bundles Galaxy's Xtreme Tuner overclocking software, as against the Magic Panel software the pre-release iteration was spotted with, by Chinese media.
Source:
VR-Zone
Galaxy made the release-grade card a bit more retail-friendly by using a slightly modified Accelero Twin-Turbo cooler made by Arctic Cooling. The new cooler keeps the footprint of this card within three expansion slots. The Galaxy GeForce GTX 260+ features factory-overclocked parameters, of 625/1350/1050 MHz (core/shader/memory), a 7% overclock over the reference speeds. It uses the 55 nm G200b core, with 216 stream processors and 896 MB of GDDR3 memory. Interestingly, the card bundles Galaxy's Xtreme Tuner overclocking software, as against the Magic Panel software the pre-release iteration was spotted with, by Chinese media.
32 Comments on Galaxy Releases GeForce GTX 260+ Non-Reference Card, Changes Cooling Specifications
It looks nice, probly does cool the GPU and ram well, but all that heat in my case is bad.
A cooler blowing air out the back, only has a small slit to get the air out of - that means you need a high pressure fan to blow the heat out, which also means high noise.
When you use a heatsink with air blowing in every direction, you're giving more places for the heat to radiate to, therefore lower card temperatures.
Who really cares anyway, stock coolers leave the heat inside your case, your CPU and hard drives leave heat inside your case... just get a bloody case fan, problem solved. If i can get an 8800GTX to run in a mATX case with no heat issues and no rear exhaust fan, anyone can get one of these cards working in a regular case.
However, they need to design a bigger (and quieter) one for the GTX 260/280 range.
i would have thought with the release fo the official GT200 supporting cooler from AC out soon they would have waited.
That and the official cooler from AC should perform MUCH better.
www.arctic-cooling.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=2_&mID=237
I contacted Scan.co.uk , they said it is released in March.
Either Galaxy have made their own mounting system (unlikely)
Or They changed the mounting holes on the PCB (surely the chip is too big?)
So technically, its not a custom cooler, but just a more cutomized PCB.
Just a guess anyway.
(Two bored guys with a tape measure and a screwdriver)
Im assuming they just made a larger contact plate and spaced the screw mounts further apart. Like 1 day bodge it job.
My initial reaction was that it had been photoshopped cus that cooler isnt designed to fit on GT200 PCB's. I'm probably wrong. But like I said previously, surely it was a waste of NVIDIA's time changing the hole spacing from the previous generation. Ah well, guess we will have to wait and see until someone gets a hold of this card.