We're back from CES and I'm back to graphics card reviews. The 980 Hall of
Fame Edition from Galaxy or Galaxy or
Galaxy apparently galaxy 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 motherboard showdown video, never fear. I'll be working on the next
episode very soon.
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now to learn more. To begin, we have to take a look at the heart of this card.
It's performance hardware. Galaxy sets you up with a stockbased clock speed of
the 20048 CUDA core equipped GM204 chip
of 1304 MHz and a boost clock speed of a whopping 1418 MHz, which is an
impressive 202 MHz over the reference 980. The card's standard setup of 4 GB
of 256 gigabit GDR5 memory is nudged up
a little bit, understandably much less exciting, 10 MHz, resulting in an
effective 7,10 MHz compared to the reference card's 7,000 MHz. The job of
cooling all this performance is given to two 80mm fans and one 90 mm fan on top
of a seven nickelplated heatpipe aluminum fin array. Three of the heat
pipes are 6 millimeter and four of them are 8mm girth showoffs. Hiding away back
here is also uh a integrated MOSFET heat
sink that Galaxy put in as well. And last but not least, there is an
absolutely beautiful anodized aluminum back plate, 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 heat sink. This cooling setup kept the card at a
relatively cool 73°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 additions 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 MFAA, dynamic super resolution, and delta color compression,
which you can learn more about in Lionus'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 8pin power connectors that
lead to the buff eight-phase power design with eight phases for GPU and two
for memory. Moving on, the Galax 980 sticks with reference IO configuration
with three full-size display ports, one HDMI, and lastly one DVI port. And also
back here, you may notice the at first seemingly random button near the IO.
While 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 hyperboost 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 two, 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-f 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 X290X 8 GB cards. Overclocking 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 max core voltage and power
limit combined with a core clock increase of 90 MHz and a memory clock
increase of 300 MHz which resulted in an effective in-game core clock speed of
1533 MHz. While this isn't quite as high
as our EVGA classified 980s overclock of 1570 MHz, 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 them 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, two eightpin PCI power adapters, one DVI to VGA converter, and
finally, clearly the most important inclusion is a do not disturb door
doornob hanger. All right, guys, speaking of aesthetically beautiful
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the description. All right, guys. In the comments down below, do you want Lionus to make a fast as possible episode on
what the heck the Silicon Lottery is? Let me know. While you're down there,
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guys, thanks for watching. and I'll see you next time.