Galaxy GeForce GTX 470 GC Version - Flippin' Blue Fans
Temperature, Power Consumption & Overclocking
Temperature
As we discovered in our original review, the reference GeForce GTX 470 can get really hot when taxed, so we were happy to find that the Galaxy card was running at a much cooler 80 degrees Celsius under heavy load. It's still fairly hot as compared to offerings from ATI, but its a massive improvement over the stock reference cooler. On the down side, we also noticed that the cooler was slightly noisier than that of a reference one at heavy loading. We guess it's a fair price to pay for the lower operating temperatures, especially one that's overclocked out of the box.
Power Consumption
Power draw was in line with our expectations though readings at load was a little on the high side. This could be attributed to the fact that the card comes factory overclocked and it sports a non-reference designed cooler.
Overclocking
Using Galaxy's own XtremeTuner overclocking utility, we managed to bump the card's clock speed up a little to 670MHz at the core with the memory unchanged at 3348MHz DDR. Thereafter, we decided to take things up a notch and started tweaking with the voltage values. Stock voltage of the card was 1.05V and we bumped it up to 1.075V, which was near the maximum safe limit, and thereafter we managed to achieve 720MHz at the core and 3400MHz DDR at the memory. This was respectable and the resulting score on 3DMark Vantage was 8264, an improvement of 12%.