Gadgetory

we're back from CES and I'm back to graphics card reviews the 980 hall-of-fame edition from galaxy galaxies or Galax the apparently Galax now for whatever reason has made a bit of a splash for being very fast out of the box and having a beautiful all-white design including their PCB also for those of you that were enjoying the Affordable Month award showdown video never fear I'll be working on the next episode very soon cooler masters casemod World Series is your opportunity to show off your modding skills and win great prizes entries close February 7th 2015 click now to learn more to begin we have to take a look at the heart of this card its performance Hardware Galax sets you up with a stock based clock speed of the 2048 CUDA core equipped GM 204 chip of 1304 megahertz and a boost clock speed of a whopping 14 18 megahertz which is an impressive 202 megahertz over the reference 980 the card standard set up a 4 gigabytes of 256 gigabit ddr5 memory is nudged up a little bit understandably much less exciting 10 megahertz resulting in an effective 7000 10 megahertz compared to the reference cards 7000 vegard's the job of cooling all this performance is given to 280 millimeter fans and 190 millimeter fan on top of a 7 nickel-plated heat pipe aluminum Finnair a three of the heat pipes are 6 millimeter and four of them are eight millimeter girth show-offs hiding a way back here is also a integrated mosfet heatsink that galaxy put in as well and last but not least there is an absolutely beautiful anodized aluminum backplate which admittedly doesn't do a whole lot for performance but really ties the whole card together aesthetically and does offer structural support to help the card not Bend under the weight of that heatsink this cooling setup kept the card at a relatively cool 73 degrees ish while overclocked and under heavy load on our open test bench and we don't have an acoustic chamber but I also wouldn't say that it was unnecessarily loud even in our most stressful tests now I'm going to take a moment before moving on to essentially buy some time while you guys get a look at this card and appreciate what Galax has done here aesthetically again with the latest editions of their Hall of Fame series there's lots of sweet tech inside including classics like SLI CUDA GeForce experience and all the new stuff that was introduced with GTX 980 like mfa a dynamic super resolution and delta color compression which you can learn more about in Linus's original 980 launch video by clicking it now back to the aesthetic the only drawback I see here is the slightly beige color of the otherwise great dual eight pin power connectors that lead to the buff eight phase power design with eight phases for GPU and two from memory moving on the galaxy sticks with reference I owe configuration with three full-sized display ports one HDMI and lastly one DVI port and also back here you may notice these at first seemingly random button near the i/o well it isn't labeled and I couldn't easily find anything about it in their manual as they use a reference card for their examples I was able to eventually identify it as the hyper boost button which essentially increases fan speed and maximum power delivered to the GPU just by pressing it in if you've decided that you just have far too many famous things and you simply need multiple halls of fame in your computer the SLI fingers at the top of the card will happily accommodate to three or even four GPUs all linked together also at the top of the card there is a large backlit hall-of-fame logo whose brightness and lighting pattern can be controlled through software and finally we have one last little switch on the far end of the card which is you guessed it a dual BIOS switch which should enable you to try out new firmware updates and customize things relatively risk-free as we have done a whack ton of general overview style reviews on the GTX 980 already I decided to go with a slightly different route for the benchmarking on this one and went for a 4k gaming shootout between our EVGA classified 980 our Galax hall-of-fame 980 and our sapphire vapor-x 290x eight gigabyte cards well for clocking was simple enough thanks to this card coming with such an aggressive stock clock you won't actually have to push it all that hard to get a very respectable overclock my personal settings were Mac's core voltage and power limit combined with a core clock increase of 90 megahertz and a memory clock increase of 300 megahertz which resulted in an effective in-game core clock speed of 15 33 megahertz well this isn't quite as high as our EVGA classified 980 s overclock of 1570 megahertz it is important to remember that some of this could easily be attributed to the silicon lottery because not all chips are created equal as with all of our GPU reviews we're using our standard test bench the specs of which you can see on the screen you're looking at right now and all of the graphics cards used for this test are overclocked and you can find them and all of my settings for them linked in the description down below as long as Nick gets his crap together and includes a link for a change otherwise you can find it on the forum with the fun performance stuff out of the way let's get to the only question left which is what's in the box the answer may shock you a quick installation guide a user's manual - 8 pin PCI power adapters 1 DVI to VGA converter and finally clearly the most important inclusion is a do not disturb door knob hanger alright guys speaking of aesthetically beautiful things today's sponsor is Squarespace and if you want to run a website without setting up your own hosting and whatnot you should definitely check them out they have a new interface which integrates Google Apps allows you to trick your web page out with some Getty Images and has a ton of templates and cover pages for you to choose from their big focus is beautiful design with a simple and powerful 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the thread under Linus's ramblings for this video and I'm probably more likely to see your comment there also if you want a shirt that isn't this one check out the link in the description below the video because you obviously went back to YouTube for whatever reason anyways guys thanks for watching I'll see you next time