Galaxy GeForce GTX 570 MDT Surround Gaming Graphics Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,544 words · ~7 min read
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now you might think that it's a little late to be unboxing a GTX 570 but this
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one has a bit of a Twist that um you
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guys might find interesting who knows so this is the Galaxy MDT GTX 570 it's got
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1280 Megs of RAM just like most GTX 570s
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it's got a test form inside which is not actually for you guys but rather for my
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use uh it has some foam it has winds
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spit settings so this is interesting but we'll get into more about that a little
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bit later it also has the MDT series
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exclusive software settings guide which is also interesting but we'll get into
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that a little bit more later graphics card driver and then winds spit Revolution software installation disc
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this you might actually need although you should download the latest if
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available from Galaxy website okay so let's go ahead
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and see what we got for adapters we got a DVI to VGA we've got a mini HDMI to
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HDMI these are goldplated this uh well the HDMI one is this one's not the HDMI
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one is a goldplated adapter though that's kind of nice little extras go a
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long way so we've got dual Molex to PCI E8 pin and then we've got dual MOX to
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PCI E6 pin just in case you don't have the appropriate PCI Express slots on
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your or slots connectors on your power supply although if you're still using a
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power Supply that's only got Molex connectors to plug into your graphics
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card it's probably time to think about upgrading
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anywho so let's go
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ahead and get this opened up and I will get into what is very interesting about
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this particular video card so the 570 is still by All rights a high performance
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graphics card but it's always had a bit of a disadvantage in the market compared
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to its competition from AMD and that is
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that the GTX 570 has never supported
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more than two displays out at a time for
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surround gaming unless you buy two of them so how did Galaxy see fit to
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address this we'll check this out they put four DVI connectors One Mini HDMI as
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well although that's less relevant and I'll talk about that in a little bit four DVI connectors on this card making
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it capable of driving up to
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three displays in surround plus an additional monitor which is very very
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cool I mean I I I suppose you could run four displays at a time but that
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wouldn't be very beneficial cuz you'd have a bezel like right in the middle so
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this is a gaming card it's intended for gaming so I'm going to go ahead and say
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that I think the intended use is probably for three displays at 1080p in
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a surround gaming mode so how have they achieved this well one they have a
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custom designed card so you can see this is a complete complely non- reference
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card with four DVI connectors on it as
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well as an aftermarket cooler so here
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there you go you guys can have a look at the cooler so it's got an 80 mm fan and
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a very beefy and very heavy heat sink going on here so check this out we've
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got one two heat pipes three heat pipes
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it's hard to kind of see those in there uh how many heat pipes do we have total
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can you see in there four heat pipes total I think it's four heat pipes total
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yeah yeah so four heat pipes total including uh so two coming out to the
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left here or to the right and then two coming out to the left very dense
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aluminum thin array on both sides as
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well as a downward draft fan that is actually very cleverly positioned
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because it's almost directly over the pwm so while we can use these heat pipes
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that are positioned directly above the GPU to distribute that heat to the rest
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of the fins we use the Fan's direct Cooling in order to keep the voltage
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Regulators cool enough so that's pretty
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much it for that part of the card so let's get back to the display so you
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have a couple different options you can run them normally so you can see there's
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dvii DVID D1 dvi2 and DVID D3 you can
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either run two dvis three
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dvis two dvis and an HDMI or you can run
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four dvis or three dvis and an HDMI and I'll be back in a sec so
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there's a fair bit of Hocus Pocus that is going on with this particular
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graphics card so in order to achieve the whole triple monitor gaming thing
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because really that's how many monitors you can span a single virtual display
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much like the way ifinity works we've got these numbered ones so we've got
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DVID 1 2 and 3 and these guys are only good up to 1920 x 1080 if you're running
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three at a time so bear that in mind 1080p monitors are the most you're going
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to be able to do triple displays on however it should be noted that with a
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GTX 570 level graphics card unless you're running more than one card you're
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probably only going to want 3 1080p monitors anyway you're not going to run
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33 in off something like this okay so you either run two displays plus one
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which runs off either of these or you run three displays plus one that runs
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off either of these so this is great for I used to play a fair bit of Supreme
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Commander so if I wanted to run triple Monitor and then have my mini map
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displayed on an additional one that is how I would do it because Supreme
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Commander was multi-display capable whereas if you have a game like race
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driver grid you would only be able to run it off one Monitor and then you
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might be able to have like task manager or whatever displayed it depends on whether the game is multi-display
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compatible or not so these guys create one virtual display these guys are a
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secondary monitor so I hope that that's clear now Galaxy does provide a couple
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pieces of software the both the wind split as well as the easy easy y easyy
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display software settings so you can use that in in order to configure everything
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properly because it's not built into the GeForce driver this is a Galaxy
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exclusive technology which is one of the reasons I don't know if you guys have noticed but this is the first time I've
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ever looked at a Galaxy card but this is one of the reasons why I think this one
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is so neat because unlike any other gForce card other than the GTX 590 which
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is kind of cheating because it has two gpus on it to achieve its surround
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gaming Glory this one supports surround
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so it is a direct competitor and it is completely feature competitive against
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any AMD card because not only does it have 3D Vision and all that good stuff
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it also has ifinity which I don't know
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what to call it I mean we'll call it NVIDIA surround I guess cuz that's what it's called when you have two cards but
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it's got it on a single card so since I've never talked about Galaxy before I
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should probably mention a couple other things so they've got 247 365 tech
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support for us and Canada only I don't know about other territories guys
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extreme tuner HD so they've got some overclocking software they also have a
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oneclick easy y buttons Ultra simple multi display window management so
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that's that software that they included and then they've also got a couple of
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other cool things so they've got a dual BIOS we're used to seeing these on motherboards now but it's not that often
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we see it on graphics cards AMD has started doing it on some of their cards
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on the very high end but here we go there's galaxy adding it to uh NVIDIA
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cards when no one else has it power meter allows you to monitor the entire
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card's status and power consumption and voltage settings so for full control for
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extreme overclockers I don't know how many extreme overclockers are going to
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need a card like this because they aren't typically running four displays at a time but there you go I guess the
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options are there so thank you for checking out this unboxing and first
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look at the en NVIDIA well it is NVIDIA
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NVIDIA Galaxy GeForce GTX 570 MDT with
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multi-display technology don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for more
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