12 - 9600 GT Galaxy OC edition (1)
Galaxy GeForce 9600 GT 512MB OC
Then the turn goes to Galaxy, and they are going through the roof at launch time as they offer a really prominent product. We will put their OC model to the test. The product is self-developed and engineered product and comes with a blue PCB, a very interesting new cooler, ships with a core clock frequency of 675 MHz (650 on reference) and has faster memory clocked at an effective speed of 2000 MHz (1800 on reference). Not only the faster clocks determine the "OC" branding though, contrary ... Galaxy implemented two BIOSes on the cards as well, one fail-safe and one to get your freak on ;)
So if you want to your can go wacky and increase clock-speeds of the card, and then flash them into the second BIOS. Now if you messed up the BIOS with your flash, no problem ... with a flick of your finger you will return to the default BIOS at any time. These features and a couple more are merged together under a new marketing label. The combination of hardware and software will be called Galaxy's "Xtreme Tuner" and also incorporates additional home-grown overclocking software .
It is an application linked with the card using a small chip. Xtreme tuner will also allow you you to read all of the card parameters like temperature, and clocks frequencies. But more importantly; it enables overclocking on the core, memory and shader domain (separately).
The (any) Galaxy product comes with a two year warranty and this OC model with Xtreme tuner should cost roughly 230 USD / 200 EUR. Which definitely is a little more expensive compared to the reference cards.
But see, Galaxy do what they do best ... customizing graphics cards. Let's have a peek at the product, bundle and of course that new Xtreme Tuner application.
Xtreme tuner
Though a nice application, it's still far from perfect and most certainly does not offer you the flexibility as software like Rivatuner does.
This is Galaxy's new toy application. It's a piece of monitoring and overclocking software & has the ability to flash the secondary BIOS. Overall a pretty decent impression. You can control everything independently. At this point I'm not quite sure how well the application will work out as it seems a little too beta. For example an overclock towards 700 MHz froze up windows while I was able to overclock it manually at that speed perfectly.
But I do have some negatives that Galaxy needs to look into; next slide please:
Check out at what values I am able to set the core and shaders at ... 1350 & 3250 MHz respectively!! Now I didn't hit apply on the Xtreme tuner here as I'd almost certainly blow the internal GPU fuses. The fail-safe boundaries need to set way tighter.
Also this Xtreme Tuner series allows you to flash the second BIOS. Yet you will not have to option to edit & or save values in the BIOS flash file from within this software at all. You'd need 3rd party software to alter BIOS values, and only then you can use this software to physically flash the BIOS onto the second BIOS.
But hey; if you screw it up, the fail-safe that was built in is pretty good. At PC POST / bootup simply press CTRL-ALT-DEL within the first 10 seconds; then boot into windows (you are now in your fail-safe BIOS). In windows simply go here and download your original BIOS, hit Flash BIOS in Xtreme Tuner and after the flash restart. Pretty simple and safe ... Xtreme tuner however still needs a lot of work as far as I'm concerned.
Software aside, let's look at the hardware; Galaxy surely made a nice card for you guys.
The packaging, a completely new box design for Galaxy. That's looking much better than the old boxes.
