Galaxy Video Cards (1 Viewer)

[Galbreath34]

Anybody here ever use one from them?

I've gotten a little tired of pretty good perf on my rig, and started by grabbing a new Ivy Bridge, giving up the pokey AMD. I'm thinking of going back to nVidia with a 680, and Galaxy has some pretty nicely overclocked, and are reasonable within the $500 category compared to EVGA. Looks like they're solid and have been around, but I haven't known anyone who's had one. I know the chips are gonna be the same, just wondering about the cooling or reliability and such.

I figured more here would be using gaming cards than in general tech.

 

[ASaintFerLife]

Yeah I have used 2 Galaxy made video cards in the past, a GT 220 and a GTS 250.

I bought mine used off ebay, got the home, pulled the fan and heatsink off them, cleaned the crappy heat paste off and put Artic Silver on them.

They both overclocked very well, never any problems.

 

[Galbreath34]

Yeah, I took the plunge and got this one from Newegg. So far so good. It basically pegs the vsync on Skyrim with a bazillion addons, ENB, SMAA, AO and everything maxed. Combined with moving to a 3570K, I've more than doubled my performance in most games. Rift even seems to do well now, though haven't really raided or done heavy stuff, it's always mid-30s in crowded areas where I used to droop to 15-20. I'll update later if it turns out anything goes awry, but so far so good. It even clocked out out of the box higher than promised (1287 instead of 1267, not much, but nice).

The packaging was pretty decent too, kind of Razer style. My one gripe was noted in the reviews on Newegg: except for the one display port, the connectors are all HDMI-mini, and the only included adapters are mini-full and full HDMI to DVI. I wound up doing the ugly mini to full chained to DVI for one monitor, and was prepared with a mini to full HDMI cable for the other. The cooling and build on the card are fairly quiet compared to my MSI 6970 and much better than my older EVGA 480.

So far, I'd recommend it without hesitition. Oh, another mild peeve is literally the day after I ordered it they added a free copy of Assassin's Creed as a promo, but Newegg customer service basically said "Bite Me". I still like them, but they aren't the customer service wonders they used to be 5 years ago.

 

[Galbreath34]

Posting about upgrades made me think of this one. Just wanted to update that the card has been phenomenal. It's stably OC'd, runs cool and eats most of what I throw at it. It runs cooler than most of the EVGA or MSI cards I've had in the past, and I'll probably actually look for Galaxy's versions as first choice in the future. Probably doesn't matter, but just thought I'd update it with my 2 cents after 5 months of beating it up.