Appearance and thoughts
I've often lamented that a wide range of today's AIBs are simply content to use an absolutely reference card design. Some don't bother to distinguish their cards at all, not even by adding a company-specific sticker. There's nothing inherently wrong with this approach at all, but then differentiation is simply undertaken on price and nothing much else.
GALAXY has teamed up with Arctic Cooling to produce an unusual-looking GeForce 6800 128MB video card. Arctic Cooling's rise to fame came about with its excellent ATI-based VGA Silencer aftermarket coolers. They outperformed and outcooled standard ATI GPU coolers and were quiet-ish when doing so. GALAXY Technologies have commissioned Arctic Cooling to produce a VGA Silencer that's compatible with NVIDIA's 6800-series of GPUs. The aesthetic result is evident above.
A thick slab of copper attaches to both the RAM chips and GPU concurrently. The heat is absorbed by the copper and consequently radiated by the fins on the upper side. The large cooler fan then pushes the absorbed heat through the enclosed plastic shell and out to the back of the card and PC.
You can just about make out the fins in the above picture. The very rear is open, such that the warm air can be expelled from the case. The obvious benefit of this approach to cooling is a lower in-case ambient temperature. The traditional approach is to have heat radiate from the cooler into other parts of the case's interior section. The one downside is the extra PCI slot that's taken up by the cooling apparatus. Users with small form-factor PCs will have to forego GALAXY's Glacier line, unfortunately. The Glacier 6800 also carries a traditional S-Video (TV-Out), DVI, and VGA output connections. VIVO, once again, is left out in the cold.
Apart from the oversized cooler there's nothing unusual about the front of the Glacier 6800. A single Molex socket carries enough auxillary power.
The bottom side shows just what an efficient design Arctic Cooling's Silencer is. Simply remove the four screws on the underside and the cooler comes away. It's possible because all 8 RAM chips are located on the same side as the GPU. Regular GeForce 6800s are clocked in at 325MHz core and 700MHz RAM, although what exactly is regular is open to debate. GALAXY has raised its 6800's core speed to 350MHz and kept the basic 700MHz RAM speed. What official specifications fail to tell you is that the card uses 2.2ns Hynix DDR1 RAM chips that are nominally rated at 900MHz. Overclocking this 6800 should be some fun.
Appearance-wise, GALAXY's Glacier 6800 is distinct from all others. It's not simply for looks alone. GALAXY raises the card's core speed and provides DDR1 RAM with plenty of overhead above the specified 700MHz. Another issue that needs to be touched on is noise, or lack of it. Arctic Cooling's VGA Silencer not only provides GALAXY with the confidence to raise core clocks to 350MHz, it's also extremely quiet in use, far quieter than a reference GeForce 6800's cooling fan.
